Sitting around, drinking coffee, dragging a line through the deeps of the Internet, seeing what I can hook: It’s been a pleasant morning. First I discovered Word Porn, then, buried in that: TIM MINCHIN!
I can’t believe I don’t know about this guy. I do now. Here’s a taste:
You’re welcome,
BuFoon Steve
(I know, we just did a Dude post, but we’re late in celebrating the 20th Anniversary of the release of The Big Lebowski on March 6, 1998. So, there are extenuating circumstances.)
If the Church of BuVu was to organize an InterFaithInHumor Conference, our first invitee would be Dudeism. I love our origins and our name, but credit-where-credit-is-due: Dudeism rocks. As a name and as a religion. We’ve missed it by five days, but here’s a tribute on the 20th Anniversary of the release of The Big Lebowski:
Why The Dude Endures | Nerdist
“There is a paradise in and around you right now, and to be there you don’t even have to make a move, not even lifting your eyes from this page. You can open yourself to the diamondlike perfection of everything you see and feel. If you don’t think it can happen that easily, just be loving, moment by moment, and trust that it will come to you.”
This is such a lovely book and Thaddeus Golas was such an interesting man. The Lazy Man’s Guide to Enlightenment (Wikipedia)
(I loved this book when I found it, years ago, even memorized many of the one-liners in the final chapter, “Even Lazier”. Steve G.)
Here’s an online version for your enlightenment:
“Crazy wisdom is, of course, the opposite of conventional wisdom. It is wisdom that deliberately swims against the current in order to avoid being swept along in the numbing wake of bourgeois compromise; wisdom that flouts taboos in order to undermine their power; wisdom that evolves when one, while refusing to avert one’s gaze from the sorrows and injustices of the world, insists on joy in spite of everything; wisdom that embraces risk and eschews security; wisdom that turns the tables on neurosis by lampooning it; the wisdom of those who neither seek authority nor willingly submit to it.” Tom Robbins (Excerpt from In Defiance of Gravity, Harper’s, September 2004)
This article should be BuVu Holy Writ. It’s long, but it’s tasty. Click on the image below for the whole enchilada:
A Sunday morning homily:
“The gods have a great sense of humor, don’t they? If you lack the iron and fizz to take control of your own life, if you insist on leaving your fate to the gods, then the gods will repay your weakness by having a grin or two at your expense. Should you fail to pilot your own ship, don’t be surprised at what inappropriate port you find yourself docked. The dull and prosaic will be granted adventures that will dice their central nervous systems like an onion, romantic dreamers will end up in the rope yard. You may protest that it is too much to ask of an uneducated fifteen-year-old girl that she defy her family, her society, her weighty cultural and religious heritage in order to pursue a dream that she doesn’t really understand. Of course it is asking too much. The price of self-destiny is never cheap, and in certain situations it is unthinkable. But to achieve the marvelous, it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought.”
Near Death Experience (NDE) accounts have multiplied as the Internet and social media have made it easier to access them. They are often written off as some sort of by-product of the body shutting down as death approaches, or they’re given some similar theoretical dismissal.
But many of them contain detail and phenomena that belie this dismissiveness. Insisting on rigorous examination and proof is good science. But having a closed mind to the possibility that there are other dimensions of consciousness that transcend our current abilities to see and sense and measure is not such good science. What lies beyond time and space and matter and our physical senses?
To use a legal metaphor, we require proof “beyond a reasonable doubt” if someone has been accused of a crime. However, in other non-criminal cases, judges and juries make important decisions that affect people’s lives based on “a preponderance of the evidence.” Sometimes lawyers describe this by saying that the evidence in favor of a particular claim outweighs the evidence against it by something more than 50%.
Which leads to this suggestion: Consider the following account of an NDE, and others you can find on many websites if you have an interest, using the “preponderance of the evidence” standard. There are many people, including many scientists, who have either concluded that these experiences are “objectively real” or that there is enough evidence they are “real” to not be so dismissive. Just sayin’.
Here’s the NDE account: Understand the Gift To Enjoy the Treasure
(And here are a couple of excellent NDE websites: Near Death Experience Research Foundation and International Association for Near Death Studies)
“There are two BuVu Precepts: Be Truthful and Be Kind.” Niels Holm, Founder
That should be enough foundation to build any church on, but there was something else Niels loved to talk about when two or three BuFoons were gathered together:
Soulfulness
I hope what the Church of BuVu and its BuFoons can offer, to each other and to our own small worlds, and thence to the bigger world, is Soulfulness. Whatever that is. We’ll get into it.
Thinking about this sent me googling for what I recall of Carl Jung’s take on the human condition, what he called the “spiritual problem:”
“Small and hidden is the door that leads inward, and the entrance is barred by countless prejudices, mistaken assumptions, and fears. Always one wishes to hear of grand political and economic schemes, the very things that have landed every nation in a morass. Therefore it sounds grotesque when anyone speaks of hidden doors, dreams, and a world within. What has this vapid idealism got to do with gigantic economic programmes, with the so-called problems of reality?
“But I speak not to nations, only to the individual few, for whom it goes without saying that cultural values do not drop down like manna from heaven, but are created by the hands of individuals. If things go wrong in the world, this is because something is wrong with the individual, because something is wrong with me.
“Therefore, if I am sensible, I shall put myself right first. For this I need—because outside authority no longer means anything to me—a knowledge of the innermost foundations of my being, in order that I may base myself firmly on the eternal facts of the human psyche.”
(Carl Jung, The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man)
Would you agree that America has a spiritual problem? More specifically, I think we have a Soulfulness problem. And, in my very humble opinion, we have a leader who is the least spiritual, least soulful we have ever had.
I know political action and activism, especially voting, is indispensable. But, if it’s possible for something to be “more indispensable,” I think that something is Soulfulness.
As BuFoons, talking with Niels about Soulfulness, we weren’t very good at describing it to each other. Mostly we would just offer our own candidates:
Art, Dance, Humor, Literature, Music, Nature, Sports … i.e. Beauty, Creativity, Imagination, Performance. If we were having this discussion this morning (that makes me melancholy) we would add the Women’s March.
(Not on anybody’s list: Business, Capitalism, Economics, Politics, Religion. Not on my list: Christmas, Winter.)
There were musicians, of course: Jimmy Hendrix, Bob Marley, Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye, Eric Clapton, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, James Taylor. Many others, obviously.
Some comedians: Lenny Bruce, Eddie Murphy, Richard Pryor, Robin Williams. Many more of these, too.
Leaders like Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, or JFK.
Lots of writers and poets. For me, Tom Robbins. For others, Maya Angelou, Richard Brautigan, Kurt Vonnegut, Mary Oliver, Margaret Atwood. This would be a really long list.
Who and what would you add to these short lists? Think about it, get stirred up about my lists vs. your lists. Have some fun.
Speaking of Tom Robbins, I’m going to step aside and let my personal Soulfulness guru speak:
“If you need to visualize the soul, think of it as a cross between a wolf howl, a photon, and a dribble of dark molasses. But what it really is, as near as I can tell, is a packet of information. It’s a program, a piece of hyperspatial software designed explicitly to interface with the Mystery. Not a mystery, mind you, the Mystery. The one that can never be solved.
“To one degree or another, everybody is connected to the Mystery, and everybody secretly yearns to expand the connection. That requires expanding the soul. These things can enlarge the soul: laughter, danger, imagination, meditation, wild nature, passion, compassion, psychedelics, beauty, iconoclasm, and driving around in the rain with the top down. These things can diminish it: fear, bitterness, blandness, trendiness, egotism, violence, corruption, ignorance, grasping, shining, and eating ketchup on cottage cheese.
“Data in our psychic program is often nonlinear, nonhierarchical, archaic, alive, and teeming with paradox. Simply booting up is a challenge, if for no other reason than that most of us find acknowledging the unknowable and monitoring its intrusions upon the familiar and mundane more than a little embarrassing.
“But say you’ve inflated your soul to the size of a beach ball and it’s soaking into the Mystery like wine into a mattress. What have you accomplished? Well, long term, you may have prepared yourself for a successful metamorphosis, an almost inconceivable transformation to be precipitated by your death or by some great worldwide eschatological whoopjamboreehoo. You may have. No one can say for sure.
“More immediately, by waxing soulful you will have granted yourself the possibility of ecstatic participation in what the ancients considered a divinely animated universe. And on a day to day basis, folks, it doesn’t get any better than that.”
Tom Robbins in Esquire
Here’s more from the same vein in his last novel, Villa Incognito. This is Stubblefield talking to a rapt audience of Buddhist villagers about soul, something of a foreign concept to them:
“… Religion is the wrong, if conventional, place to turn. Religion is little more than a transaction in which troubled people trade their souls for temporary and wholly illusionary psychological comfort – the old give-it-up-in-order-to-save-it routine. Religions lead us to believe that the soul is the ultimate family jewel and that in return for our mindless obedience, they can secure it for us in their vaults, or at least insure it against fire and theft. They are mistaken.”
…
“How then does soul differ from spirit? … “… soul is connected to Mother Earth just as spirit is connected to Father Sky. … Generally, if spirit is the fresh air vent and ambient lighting in the house of consciousness, if spirit is the electrical system that illuminates that house, then soul is the smoky fireplace, the fragrant oven, the dust wine cellar, the strange creaks we hear in the floorboards at night.”
…
“In the end, perhaps we should simply imagine a joke; a long joke that’s being continually retold in an accent too thick and too strange to ever be completely understood. Life is that joke, my friends. The soul is its punch line.”
…
“Let’s not chisel that last remark in stone. Okay? It may be high wisdom, it could be pure bullshit.”
(It’s worth noting that Niels’ idea was to add soulfulness to Buddhism by adding his impression of Vudoo as a nitty gritty, earthy, funky, down home way of turning curses into blessings and dealing with shame. BuVu.)
The entire passage from Stubblefield’s teaching is set out below.
My new resolution (it’s still January) for 2018: I want to become more soulful.
This evening we were honored to receive a message from our Prophet, Diana Joseph, referring us to a mystical missive from writer, Amy Leach.
Here is a delicious excerpt:
Pandas have their own wisdom, unaccountable and unamendable, whose roots shoot down deeper than we can penetrate, and if they mind anyone at all it is someone more elusive than man.
Here is the entire bamboo feast: Radical Bears in the Forest Delicious by Amy Leach
The Prophet’s message is this:
Perhaps the panda is the spirit animal of the church of Buvu?
We know that “perhaps” reflects our Prophet’s customary light touch, but we receive even the lightest touch with the greatest attentiveness.
Henceforth we will know the Panda as our BuVu Spirit Animal.
Thank you for thinking of us, Diana.
Our newest member, priest, and BuFoon, Gabby Hyman, has created some marvellous BuVu images for The Church to use in our various media.
Thank you, Gabby!
