Hardcore Zen_ Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth About Reality - Brad Warner [8]
Religions and social institutions aside, I’ve always felt a need to understand the way things are. It’s hard for me to say why. In fact, it’s always been far more puzzling to me that more people don’t feel such a strong need to know. Most of the folks who say they want to understand these things seem to settle for explanations that, as far as I can see, explain things about as well as my childish ideas about being a brain in a jar or a space alien.
A lot of religious explanations remind me of the old joke about the guy who believes the world is flat and rests on the back of a giant turtle. When someone questions him about what’s under the turtle, he confidently answers, “Another turtle.” When asked what’s under that turtle he smirks and says, “You can’t trip me up with that one! It’s turtles all the way down!” Pretty much every religious explanation I’ve ever run into seems to end up with a variation on “It’s turtles all the way down.”
I could never accept someone else’s version of the truth and I don’t think anyone else should. If the meaning of life, the universe, and everything could be put into a few definitive words that everyone on Earth could agree upon now and for all time, someone probably woulda figured them out and written them down. But even if they did, it would still just be someone else’s truth—not yours. If it seems that within these pages I’m urging you to accept my version of the truth, let me apologize now for expressing myself so poorly.
At any rate, because of my experience with Terry and also the whole turtle thing, I’d pretty much ruled out religion as a path to truth. So I thought about science for a while. The idea that there could be a sensible mathematical or scientific solution that we just haven’t quite figured out yet seemed pretty appealing. But looking into that a little further, it was clear that scientific answers were never really going to do it either, because the best science can ever hope to do is represent reality in some way. But that’s not enough. Truth has to be bigger than theories, bigger than explanations, bigger than symbols. Truth can’t just explain everything. It has to include everything. It has to be everything.
The first time I left behind my own idiosyncratic philosophical theories and got into anything connected with any specific world religion happened while I was living in Africa. In 1972, when I was eight years old, my dad accepted a transfer from Firestone Tire’s Akron headquarters to their new factory in Nairobi, Kenya, where we stayed until 1975. In fourth grade I watched the movie Jesus Christ Superstar at a local Nairobi drive-in and then just afterward saw the Nairobi production of Godspell. I was eleven then and, man, that Jesus guy was cool! I got all my friends together and we made our own version of Jesus Christ Superstar called The Mod Bible. I, being the writer/ director, naturally played Jesus. My best friend Tommy Kashangaki played Saint Peter, and his brother James played Judas Iscariot. My dad shot it all on Super-8—that’s Super-8 film, kids, this was way before home video.
I still cringe when he drags that relic out for people to see, what with me pretending to be nailed to a plywood cross and my sister as Mary Magdalene skipping merrily to the crucifixion. At one point a couple of African women pass by my big death scene in which I dramatically “give up the ghost.” God only knows what they must have thought of seeing a little white kid pretending to be nailed to a piece of wood while dying theatrically.
But even then, while faking my own crucifixion, I didn’t really believe in religion. It’s the same everywhere—we go through the motions but it doesn’t mean anything because our beliefs don’t get at the root of reality. We take our believing (and our not believing too, by the way) for granted, but we rarely ever take a hard look at what belief itself really is.
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