The Lord Almighty grant us a peaceful night and a perfect end.

I just got back from the Compline at St. Marks. I really enjoyed the experience. It was a cold and rainy night as Jordan and I braved the slippery roads on the scooter. Upon arriving in the parking lot a fellow scooterist commented that we were "brave souls" Why thank you sir. The cathedral was old and beautiful. We laid down on the floor and looked up at the ceiling. After a few moments of shuffling  the choir began. The first note sent chills up my spine, but that moment was as close as I would get to feeling anything transcendent. This experience has led me to an understanding of just how short my attention span is. While the music was beautiful, people kept walking around, coming in late. And I was struck with this irresistible desire to see what they looked like. I can't explain it. I wanted to know what people that go to church looked like I suppose. (They look like people) I was surprised when Jordan and I sat down that many of the people near us were close to our age. They even were kinda dressed like us.
But my inability to concentrate has intrigued me.
A practice in meditation. I have never been able to successfully meditate for longer than 2 minutes. And that 2 minutes is after an intense yoga work out. This week I want to give meditation a try. Tomorrow morning will be my first attempt. Next Sunday I want to go to the meditation service at the Buddhist Temple. There is a meditation group at Seattle U as well that I want to look into.
I do want to go back to St. Marks again. I liked the feeling of it. It felt ancient. I want to try again. I feel like I was on the edge. I just barely missed something.

Material.

When my grandfather died there was the issue of what to do with his house. It was an old house, but really nice, in the more historic part of town. My mother wanted nothing to do with it. She wanted to sell it. It wasn't her childhood home. They had to sell their farm long ago, so to her it was just a house that my grandparents had lived in at one time. But, for my aunts it was an entirely different story. They wanted to keep the house in the family. They had the idea of renting it out, as soon as this idea popped up my mum had them buy her out. She already knew that this renting ordeal was going to be a disaster. They immediately started making renovation plans that were extensive, but ended up in a great white fence around the whole property. They couldn't bear to change anything else. And as for the renter? My aunt (who lives in Mill Valley, CA) is renting out the mother-in-law in the basement, for the 2 times a year she comes to visit. As for the house...no one lives there. A lot of the furniture is still there and some of the antiques my aunts didn't have room for. It sits, empty, like a museum in honor of my grandparents. Why was it so easy for my Mum to let go while my Aunts are still holding on with all their might? My Mum is more attached to the spiritual reality. She is so sure that she will see her parents in heaven. She doesn't need some house to remind her. She can even talk to them through God. While my Aunts, who don't necessarily believe in anything, need the tangible reality to assure them that there will be something they leave behind when they are gone, they need a physicalization of their memory.

My aunts. There are three and they are all interesting in their own way. One fell in love with a wealthy business man. They never married, never had children. He died and she got some of the money. Another fell in love with another wealthy man. He didn't die, but they never married, never had children. The third...she has been living with the same women since before I was born, but she is not a lesbian because that wouldn't be right...at least not in my family.  My mother is the only one that lives a (so called) average life of children and a husband.
I don't know what this has to do with my project, but it's interesting. Maybe if all my aunts had married and had been Christians like my mother I would be more willing to except the conceit. But to grow up with so many other options around me...
I find myself attached to the physical objects in an embarrassing way. I will cry over a lost sweater. I want to not care in these things and trust that there is more. But, something is always holding me back. I am filled with doubt and the ominous "What if!?"

A man who takes psychedelics to experience God. Gotta love the beard. When he talks about his sadness of telling his mother that he finds God through drugs and her disappointment, I really can relate. Not on the side of taking drugs, but just the simple fact that I can't easily believe what she believes.

The thing that really struck me in this video was the little kids. Writhing on the floor and crying. I remember being one of those kids. But I don't know if it was god or my intense desire for God that compelled me to tears. I even used to speak in tongues (Or at least I thought I could at the time). I don't anymore. It feels like pretend. Like pretending to speak a different language. I remember I was in a wooden room at church camp, and the counselor said that you may never be able to do it your whole life. It's a special gift that only a few people get. Well, I was a bit of a precocious little kid and what kind of kid wouldn't want a special gift that no one else had. So the words fell out of my mouth. It's weird for me to talk about it.  I'm always worried that people will think I'm a Christian. I'm not. Their exclusiveness freaks me out. This video freaks me out too.

ChurchesTemplesandMosquesohmy!

I've looked into service that I can go to and I intend to start going to some next week. 
I want to try to go to a new church (or what have you) at least one a week and then I will write about my experience here. 
Here are a few that I'm going to start with.

Compline at St. Marks

9:30 p.m. in the Cathedral Nave
Ancient nighttime prayers, sung by the Compline Choir. 
A Seattle tradition, broadcast on KING 98.1 FM.

Saint Nicholas Russian Orthodox

Saturday - 6:00 PM

• All-Night Vigil: Vespers and Matins

Seattle Buddhist Church

Every Sunday
8:45 a.m.	Meditation Service at 1441 S. Main St. Sutra chanting, 20-minute meditation, discussion.
10:00 a.m.	Main Service in the hondo (main sanctuary). Sutra chanting, singing, and dharma talk.

Mars Hill

Saturday 6PM

Sunday 9AM | 11:15AM | 5PM | 7:15PM

Temply De Hirsch Sinai Jewish Reform Synagogue

Torah & T'filah Together - Seattle
Saturday,  09:30 Vendanta Society of Western Washington

Devotional Singing

Every Sunday evening at 7:00 pm, we have a singing of Ram-Nam in Sanskrit along with other devotional songs in English, Hindi, and Bengali. All are welcome.

I just tried to email the Mosque in Northgate, but their email does not appear to be working. And their website has rules for visitors but no actual times for visitors to visit. Does that mean I can just show up? I don't know... I'll try to email them again later.

Also I would like to go to the meditations that are happening at Westlake. If Occupy is still happening... I was there last night with the intention to stay the night, but there were so few people there and we weren't even allowed to sit on the ground. It isn't safe to stay there if there aren't enough people. Anyway, if it is still happening I would love to talk to some of the people down there. In a way, protest is a religious experience. I ran to join the march after work yesterday and you could feel a collective consciousness. The way my boyfriend speaks about it...it makes me want to rise up and join in. But, I get there and see all these people feeling and shouting and fighting. And I find that I do not feel the same way. Even though I want to. Maybe I should be a little easier on my boyfriend. My religion may exist on a spiritual plain while his is in the tangible. But now my head just exploded. If the act of protest is religion then nearly everything else could be argued to be religion. The idea of functionalism... 

"Functionalism in the philosophy of mind is the doctrine that what makes something a mental state of a particular type does not depend on its internal constitution, but rather on the way it functions, or the role it plays, in the system of which it is a part."

If it acts like something then it is indeed that something. My world just became a solar system. I need a moment to think.

AHHHH LATE!

This post will not be very in depth as I have not had much time to research anything. But next week will be better I promise. This week I will keep the work load light and research which churches or what have you I will go to so that next week I can actually go to them. I read my project in play writing and it was really inspiring and help me focus into the things I need to do. I need to focus on my personal experience and stories and maybe even have a few new experiences of my own.  Right now it's difficult because I passed the first hurdling and it was hard and terrifying and it all turned out all right in the end. But I cannot live in the fact that it was all right. I need to keep pushing to get this project to portray my passion for this subject. Sure it's fine as it is now. But I don't want it to be just fine. It needs to be....more than fine.
Stay tuned for next week's adventure!

Now is the time to be lost right?

I've spent three hours arranging video, writing and laying on my floor and I've realized a few things. I need more interviews and my writing does not encapsulate my passion  as much as I'd like. I still don't know how to make that happen though. I hate everything I've written and none of my ideas make sense. I'm at a loss. But I think I'm right on schedule...for being lost that is. Actually I just looked at the schedule and I'm a week early! Leave it to me to be ahead of schedule.
I'm hoping that the reading I'm doing in playwriting on Wednesday will help my focus. I'm going to ask which parts are unnecessary and which need to be expanded on. I think that will help focus my research and reenergize my ideas. Tomorrow I'm going to write up some very specific questions to ask so that I can make the best of reading such a disheveled mess of words.
I have another movie about the afterlife that I'm going to watch and I want to tailor my research for this week more specifically after the reading.

Moment of Death

I just finished watching the National Geographic: Moment of Death.
It was a lot of science explaining what exactly happens when the body "dies"
I put dies in quotation marks because much of the movie was devoted to explaining different views of what death really is. I.E. Brain dead, heart stopped and also whether or not thought continues after basic bodily functions have ended.

Many people explain seeing a light in a tunnel at the moment of death. When the brain is in distress it actually fires from certain parts that triggers a reaction that seems like a bright light. Also the part of your brain that controls memory goes hay-wire and actually causes "your life to flash before your eyes"

There was this French guy that would weigh bodies before and after death. The body loses an average of 21 grams after death at 1 gram per hour. What is that 21 grams? Where does it go?

Another man they interviewed had open heart surgery and his heart was stopped. He was technically dead for over an hour. He explained that he felt himself raise up out of his body and he watched the surgery from above. He is able to describe specifics of the surgery even though his face was covered throughout. Neurosurgeons were asked if they could explain this and they were unable to.
If our consciousnesses can be separated from our bodies, then where do they go when they are finished with their vessels. What if there's just a bunch of consciousness floating around. Is someone in the room right now?

National Geographic: Moment of Death. Dir. Mark Mannucci. National Geographic, 2008. DVD.

Very scientific look at death. Not much about religion. But towards the end discusses human consciousness and whether or not it dies with the body

Community

I've been trying to put my finger on why I'm so drawn to Hinduism surely the bright colors and the outfits have something to do with it but I think it also has to do with this:

It feels like community is so strong. You never see a group of Christians doing this in the middle of town. Sure in Christianity your church creates it's own community. But it's like a gated community that has quiet hours and calls you to tell you to mow your lawn. For the Hindus the whole town gets together to celebrate their gods. 

I feel like the fact that Hinduism has so many gods and people can choose who they connect the most with also helps. There isn't one way, one god. 

Also. There is no separation between church and state where most Hinduism is practiced. Huge religious rituals would never happen in the middle of Westlake. I read part of a book that claims Hinduism in some ways is not a religion, but more a way of life. A system of beliefs. It's so engrained in society that most everyone simply believes without question. Now countries that believe in Hinduism are far from perfect. The caste system is practically inescapable. But I would like to see those religious rituals. To be taken up by the crowd in a passion. It used to happen for Christianity in the Middle Ages. I wonder if we all could someday get together and celebrate everyone's god and everyone's faith. 

But here I am talking about community and whenever I have a chance to be a part of a church community I try to get out of it in anyway possible. Whenever I go back home I'm forced to go to this church that cost 25 million dollars to build. Money that the church community raised. But, why? How many starving children could that money have fed?  Do we really need an atrium and a coffee shop to worship God? Every time I go there I feel farther away from God. 

My thoughts are a little jumbled in this post. They were much clearer when I was discussing this with my boyfriend. But that's just how it goes right? 

This week I emailed the Hindu Organization at UW. Wrote a bit. Annotated most of my sources that I've used so far. And read a chapter in The Feast of Fools. I researched ways of preparing to die and looked at several hospice websites. I got a little scared so I listened to this song.

Next week I hope to: Call the Hindu Temple. Write a bit more. Interview Michael Blalock and Matt Aguayo. Read more in The Feast of Fools. And I know I should be more specific and not just put 'research' but following where this research takes me is working out pretty well for me. How about I say that I shift my focus away from Hinduism and on to Islam and Judaism (except for the possible interview and my occasional whirlwinds of passion). Deal? Deal.

I'm curious if community is necessary for worship. Are there any religions that focus more on the self than the group?

Satanism is obvious. But I wonder if there are others. 

My new mantra:

All shall

be well,

and all shall

be well,

and all manner

of thing

shall be well.

-   Dame Julian of Norwich - 
- 14th Century Mystic –