AlterNet: It's All God -- Amen, Om, Whatever

[marmar]

It's All God -- Amen, Om, Whatever

By Anneli Rufus, AlterNet. Posted December 6, 2008.

Eliezer Sobel bowed, chanted, nude wrestled, meditated, and overdosed on 'shrooms in a 40-year search to find God. But he still feels empty inside.



Removing their pants and flapping their arms like chickens, they're hunting for God. Bowing, chanting, nude wrestling, clasping antlers to their heads and ingesting psychoactive vines, millions upon millions seek Him in workshops, shrines, and ballot boxes.

Just to be clear: Not long ago I would have scolded myself for writing "Him" instead of "Him or Her," because back then I was a neopagan who wrote books and rituals hailing goddessess but now I don't know anymore.

Eliezer Sobel has spent nearly forty years bowing, chanting, nude wrestling, meditating, overdosing on shrooms, puking out windows, playing guitar at Auschwitz and laughing with the Dalai Lama while urgently seeking God, gods, or at least enlightenment. He recounts these adventures -- which he calls "the endless cycle I have been caught in" and which he concedes hasn't quite worked -- in his memoir The 99th Monkey: A Spiritual Journalist's Misadventures with Gurus, Messiahs, Sex, Psychedelics, and Other Consciousness-Raising Experiments (Santa Monica Press, 2008). Oh, he tried. At 23, he doffed his trousers so that Baba Ram Dass -- who coined the phrase "Be here now" -- could assess the size of his penis. (Well, Ram Dass asked.) At another point, Sobel paid homage at the graves of a cat and camel once owned by self-proclaimed "God-man" Adi Da (formerly Franklin Jones of Jamaica, New York) --but demurred when fellow disciples began greedily gulping water that had been used to wash Adi Da's sandals. Sobel sojourned to Israel, India, Nepal. He consulted a Brazilian "healer" who told him that astral beings preside over drugs: "The entity associated with cocaine wears all white" -- well, duh -- "including top hat and gloves. The mushroom being is an ancient, wizened little Oriental man." At a workshop led by an asthmatic who took credit for bringing down the Berlin Wall via visualization, Sobel and his fellow attendees were given name tags to wear that said "God." He paid $450 to clean toilets at a Zen retreat, $150 to haul heavy equipment uphill and work twenty-hour shifts at an est one. "Two extremely attractive young women" in a San Francisco bus terminal lured him to a backwoods Moonie camp where members watched newcomers going to the bathroom and where the mealtime grace "went like this: 'Choo choo choo, choo choo choo, choo choo choo, yay yay pow!'" ........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/rights/110512/it%27s_all_god_--_amen%2C_om%2C_whatever/

[SpiralHawk]

1. "This boy needs the gen-u-ine republicon Gawd. Smirk." - BeeLievers

[pipi_k]

2. Wow...how sad

All that work to "find God" and all he has to do is go outside on a summer day, for instance, and really LOOK at a rose or a butterfly, or watch a beautiful sunset.

I know that, and I'm not even religious

[The_Commonist]

3. Exactly!

That is exactly what I was just thinking.
I've never really been in a church, not voluntarily anyway.
I have, however, found "God" countless times.
And s/he was often just hanging around in the backyard, being busy.
Of course, the mushrooms don't hurt...

[silverweb]

4. The memoir sounds very interesting.

Everyone has some kind of personal spiritual quest. Even by denying the existence of a spiritual realm at all, they're assigning answers to their search for meaning.

I have little patience with dogma or ritual, and while there's a good deal of commonality and value in the basics of all paths I've studied, I back away the moment one of them gets dogmatic and/or authoritarian.

Unlike my more detached approach, Sobel apparently threw himself enthusiastically and wholeheartedly into each step of his quest. What an adventuresome fellow and what an incredible view he must have now in retrospect!

Whether the concept of the divine is a who (god/dess, gods), or a what ("The Force" or Nature), or a self-deluding dream, it's still a quest we each have to handle in our own way and our own time.

"God is a mountain and all paths lead to the top."

Sobel's memoir sounds like it will very entertainingly echo the experiences of many who have taken a winding, exploratory, tortuous route up the mountain. I look forward to reading it.