I had no grand ambition of founding or leading a church. I still don't. In fact, I am actively doing what I can to explain that I am, objectively, only the founder. I am not the leader. There cannot be any such thing that is not declared, invented; inherently not objectively real. If I lead, it is a part of objective reality to the extent that I do it. But whether I am called a leader means only that I am called a leader by whomever decides to refer to me as such.
In many ways, the Church of Objective Reality is an anti-church. It is as descriptive as possible, avoiding prescription as much as possible. It is about practicing being as close as possible to pure perception — our best capacity to know what is — and practicing recognition of what is not that for what it necessarily must be: subjective reality, a subset of what is; thoughts, emotions. It is about acknowledging that every living thing's scope is necessarily limited.
I have a few labels for the COR that reflect not the entire thing, but major aspects of it; labels like "first framework," or "disorganized religion." But really, every church is about abstract thought, a subjective interpretation of what is, turned prescription of what is supposed to be; in human terms, how to live. But every living thing, by definition, clearly knows how to live; it is alive. Whatever it's doing, in terms of "are you alive or not," it's working.
Humans can understand that, conceptually, there are different ways one could possibly live. For any number of reasons, many are not content only to live, but want also to divine how to live better; that is, how to make their own reality better than it is, in any given moment. Humans have developed complex systems of communication, and each human innately has some capacity to invent and understand language. So, around the world, people began not just living, like the animals many forget we are, but talking about how they lived.
Around the world, in different contexts — different climates, for example, or different history — people described how they were living, to each other, whether by showing, or telling. Thoughts about ways to be were no longer limited to genetic passage. Now they could travel memetically, as culture; through language. But thoughts about how to be were (and are) still only thoughts. A thought is inherently only a subset of objective reality; limited to the one who holds it. A thought is not reality itself, but a response to perception of it. Mechanically, it is the end product of the process of noticing, experiencing, concluding.
Prescriptive religions — those that command people to live in a particular way — mechanically interfere with the believer's experience of objective reality by disrupting the first step: they condition ignorance in noticing; this necessarily mutes experiencing, supporting the practice of conclusion before fact. The end result — the thought — is necessarily distorted. That is, for example, if one is taught (and comes to believe) that there is a God who creates all things, and that God made Man and Woman, with strict definition, and no variance from those core definitions, it is natural to conclude that people like me, transgender women, are an affront of some sort to God. And so, ironically, in pursuit of instruction in how to live optimally, many have forgotten how they actually live, just live, in the first place at all. To live optimally requires context; measures of better or worse. To live, just to live, requires only being alive.
Years ago, in the Before, Jenn introduced me to Buddhist schools of thought; Buddhist frameworks for processing and understanding reality. I did not understand this at the time, but Buddhism, like every other religion I'd ever heard of to that point, is fractured and factional, with many common core elements, but divergence beyond them. So, when I say "Buddhist," I really mean "interpretations of Buddhism through the lenses of a limited subset of authors who are Buddhists, writing as Buddhists." I started with Thich Nhat Hanh, and a book called No Death, No Fear. I had what, at the time, I would have grudgingly described as a "mystical experience" — a sense of being able to see the connections between all things in objective reality. Seeing through the wall of the apartment, out to the balcony, where Jenn's bike was hanging from a hook. From parts of the bike (and the apartment wall, and the cars outside, and and and) to manufacturers all over the country or world, to the workers in those factories, to their lunches, to whomever had made those lunches, to the bakers and butchers and grocers who had provided access to all the ingredients, to the farmers, and so on, and so on, forever; all expressed as light in void. For like two minutes. I cried. Nothing like that had ever happened to me before. For more than ten years, nothing like it happened again.
I understand that experience, now, not as mystical, but as a sort of proto-visualization, an early form of what I went on to first consciously create and direct in guided lovingkindness meditation practice, but which I now frequently create consciously during informal visualizations, as well. I was experiencing a suddenly much deeper awareness of reality, so much deeper that it overwhelmed my senses for a few minutes, as I struggled to comprehend the truth of our inherent connectedness, of our interbeing. The next closest sensation to this was when I realized I was trans; that, in the context of binary gender, I had been as wrongly categorized as I possibly could be. That was followed by sensory overload, as well, while my entire body woke up for the first time, to process uninterrupted hours of lived past experience. Everything made sense deeply in this way, too. I had only two great truths: that we are all connected; that I was and always had been a girl. I understand these both as true, still, but also as incomplete expressions of what is. But, writing this, I was struck, again, that I was always already living in accordance with my church; I just did not understand what I was doing, and so made many temporally subjectively good choices that were objectively poor.
My capacity to make objectively better choices in any given moment, I realized, was founded upon my capacity to notice what is; to distinguish it from what is not. Where I failed, where I suffered, it was invariably to the degree I was not in accordance with reality. Before I understood I was a girl, I tried very hard to be a boy, while also knowing (though not understanding) that it was inherently not who I was. Naturally, my best attempts included as much avoidance of the role as possible in the first place; it wasn't who I was. So, when I found ways to check out of objective reality that were still in many ways permitted and even encouraged by what was available to me, cast as male, in the subset of objective reality I could experience, I took them. They were, more than anything else, video games.
At first, any sort of other reality was preferable. At least those other realities, if nothing else, made complete sense almost immediately, and were implicitly self-contained. In contrast, my subjective reality — that is, my lived experience of objective reality — never had made sense, prior to my realizing I was a girl, and also had no limit I could understand. But with video games, if I did not like them, I could discard them; it was easy to recognize them as not objectively real. If I loved them, I could play them again — relive those alternate realities — as often as I liked. As video games evolved, went online, became better approximations of objective reality, I invested myself more completely. I had spaces in which I could live a life, or something close to it, as someone much closer to who I really was. Not a wizard, or warrior, not a paladin or a priest. But a girl. Just a girl.
My suffering all along was not born of what I was, or even what was, at all, entirely, objectively. My suffering arose entirely because I had become attached to ideas of what was supposed to be, without ever really considering them.
Today, to give tiny example, I was planning to head down to SoDo Deli. I think of them, in many ways, as my family. Not just the owners, but everyone who works there. The shop will close early, tonight, but from then on, we will relax and enjoy food and conversation and singing and... actually, probably television, to be honest. Feelin' like 99% sure there will be television basically the whole time. Also today, as the last day of the month, I was running out of time to do a thing I generally prefer to do, and have so far only rarely failed to do: publish at least one new post on this blog a month.
I have much more to write about this, about my church. Prior to today, I had approached these blog posts as complete, distinct entities. I would sometimes interlink them, but the idea of writing an explicitly serial piece with explicitly connected pieces was always terrifying to me. I am not sure why. But when I ask myself, as I sit with apprehension over the idea of trying such an enterprise, why I am afraid, my best answers fill me with love for myself, and a gentle smile. I want to not say anything wrong. I want to not make a mistake. If I write and publish a single blog entry that is self-contained, as hermetic as I can make it, I will not have committed myself to an entire structure of things that could later be wrong, or not what I would say then. When I examine those answers gently, repeatedly, like a gentle washing, with "why?" they are reduced to only this: I do not want to mislead; I do not want to harm by misleading.
When I ask myself whether I really have any control at all over any of it — any response to what I ever do or say — I know implicitly that the answer is "no." I am only me, after all. What I can control is very limited.
Today, my tiny example, had me beginning to feel distressed, because all else I wish to pack into this blog entry, my backstory to my church, will take too long to articulate, in the context of my wanting to spend the evening with family. There is no objective benefit in my staying here and pushing myself to do what seems impossible; even if I succeed, I am still only creating a subjective benefit. I am creating relief from my own expectations. But as I understand expectations, fundamentally, as a form of "I would like it if," I have a new way to relieve myself of them. It is far simpler. I will tell you about it later.
Be safe. See you next year.
Seranine Elliot
December 31, 2016
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