For a minute there I thought you were pulling everyone's leg.
Some religions lack traces of transcendentalism, a desire to escape, and elaborate plans to escape, and have more to do with living well and in harmony with surroundings. Japanese Shinto is like that:
"...The afterlife is not a primary concern in Shinto; much more emphasis is placed on fitting into this world, instead of preparing for the next."
"Shinto has no binding set of dogma, no holiest place for worshippers, no person or
kami deemed holiest, and no defined set of prayers. Instead, Shinto is a collection of rituals and methods meant to mediate the relations of living humans and kami."
Many of the African religions that migrated to the New World with African slaves are notably similar, and the Gods that are recognized and worshipped are more presiding spirits of specific places in nature: rivers, hilltops, the ocean, the desert, the 'roads' or the 'paths, the forest, etc. Many if not all of the major religions---especially including Judaism with its strange, whirlwind God Yahweh who came out of the desert---began in these sorts of conceptualization, or
relationships.
A living relationship with a real spirit.
"The most immediately striking theme in the Shinto religion is a great love and reverence for Nature in all its forms and for natural artifacts and processes. Thus, a waterfall, the moon, or just an oddly shaped rock might come to be regarded as a kami (spirit); so might charismatic persons or more abstract entities like growth and fertility. As time went by, the original nature-worshipping roots of the religion, while never lost entirely, became attenuated and the kami took on more reified and anthropomorphic forms, with a formidable body of myth attached to them. The kami, however, are not transcendent deities in the usual Western and Indian sense of the word. Although divine, they are close to humanity; they inhabit the same world as we do, make the same mistakes as we do, and feel and think the same way as we do. Those who died will usually become kami, with their power and main characteristics given by their doings in life. Those believing other religions may be also venerated as kami after death, if there are Shinto believers who wish them to be."
The way I personally see things, is that it is the madness of culture that has lost its connection with nature that is the Moloch (see
Howl)that so many of us have had to fight against, to go to battle with, to escape from. The early Beats used to say that they had no desire to transform modern, mechanized, robot culture, they just wanted to
elude it. And to elude it meant to side-step it, and to live in some vital, healthy way.
The Vedic (Indian) religions (some but certainly not all of them), as I understand them, started from a very similar matrix: an awareness of the forces of nature and an almost
lyrical-seeing of natural powers as divinities (kami). But they also were horrified at the processes of old age, disease and death. The way things all ended and the reality of physical tragedy was too much to bear. Out of this, it seems, came the transcendental imperative, but it takes many different forms.
You could actually apply a Japanese manoeuvre, Isaac: you could discover and see in all your activities, even in the video or the teevee that brings these entertainments, the operation of kami, and you could greet them and celebrate them as such. Your teevee monitor could be transformed into a shinto-esque shrine, replete with offerings, candles, colored paper, ritual greeting, opening and closing ceremonies, and even a ritual purification prior to periods of enjoyment. Same with the garden, with dance, with art and science. Science, peculiarly, is very shinto-able: years ago some old Japanese industrialists assembled to celebrate and honor the 60s transistor (the electronic part), to recognize it, to offer to it, to see it also as a 'kami' that had, in its way, become an ancestor! They performed the ritual solemnly, because they knew that it was this transitor that enabbled Japanese culture to get from where it was to where it is now. It was in no sense a joke, and it was not a metaphor.
For example (I ask out loud) why in the hell can not I have a shinto-relationship to the marvellous yonis of young women? I think I am the first one on this forum to seriously propose this.
Realistically and truthfully, I think girls are completely wonderful, provided they have have some of the original essence (kami) and have not been so grotesquely
modified. And if they are trained to
cooperate (sorry, Pye, I won't be able to honor you in my shinto-temple, rather I will banish you and all you represent!) so much the better! Hodges says he gets tired of it (sex) but I have never gotten to that point, myself. Why should I not
elevate it, therefor, to
sacred status? By doing so I will have more respect for it, and who knows? maybe the solar deity (who in Japan is female) will shine her blessing ever more down upon me?
