Stories
Hey All, I just wanted to turn everyone on to this Awesome web series that we have had the honor to score.
Crime Drama, Cop Story, Hot Actors, Evil Empire and San Francisco. What else does one need?
From the mind of the great Film Maker Kerwin Berk……….Gold Mountain
I was out surfing around the Farallon Islands the other day and I came across a beautiful women on sitting on surfboard, whiling a way her time. She had thick black hair that dropped to her shoulders with deep, deep brown eyes. She looked at me as if it was completely natural for her to be there in this time and place and asked:
“Would you like to know your future darlin?”
“Huh?” I responded in my normal doltish manner.
“Do you want me to divine your future silly? She replied.
“Do you do this often,” I ask?
“Do what, darlin?” She looked deeply into my eyes as if waiting for me to put two and two together-never a chance for that!
“Sit around an island, in the fog, in the ocean, waiting for schmucks like me to come around so you can tell them their future?”
“No”, she said. “I live here, you came to me!”
She was right of course. I had paddled out to this crazy ass rock for no particular reason other then an urge, so I thought, why not. Let’s give the oracle a whirl.
“Sure” I said, and she then scooped up a bit of water from the ocean and let it fall gently onto the surfboard. As the drops hit the board they became tarot cards that formed the Celtic Cross. Good trick, I thought!
As far as tarot goes, it went pretty much as expected. Past, present, future all laid out on the board before me, couched in ancient symbolism, to be interpreted by a person of extra special abilities, who had all of the knowledge and certainty of a person you would expect to do this. A woman-on a surfboard-at the crack of dawn-in the middle of the ocean. (My shrink will love this!)
This thing about the tarot though, is when all is said and done, it’s just a card game, a bit of chance and interpretation. Generalities and non-specifics abound. Everyone has money issues, love issues, health issues in one form or another, so it’s a safe bet that if you run with one of those, you will look like a bit prohetic.
But I wanted to like the oracle. Hell, she just grabbed a bit of water and turned them into cards for me. (Not an easy thing to do). So I wanted the oracle to be right. Not because it foretold of great things -cause it didn’t-but because I wanted to touch that part of reality again. It had been a long while since I let anyone go there and I wanted to believe.
I remembered the spirit wars of the 80’s. Ascended master battling ascended master for dominance of the arena. (Very much like the Kung fu movies of the time). It was bloody! I had my astrological charts done, Tarot, palm, numbers, tea leaves and entrails read (The last one hurt!). Psychics healed me, warned me, told me my future, told my of my death, you name it and much to my dismay, none of it came true.
So I just watched and waited to see would win. I stayed out of the battle zones and took no sides other than my position of non-interference. I guess I was Switzerland- I even had the chocolate hook up!
After quite a while and an immense loss of spiritual blood by the community, this master, this Shyster, this con artist won. He/she then proceeded to take this flock up to some remote town in Washington State and begin the indoctrination that is still going on today. Milking the poor bastards for all they have financially, as well as spiritually. He /she used all the great tools of the trade, fear of big cities, fear of government, fear of disease, fear of anyone who wasn’t part of the “tribe”. Sound familiar?
All religions, every god damn one of them uses these tools to get you to join, cause they work! These things are close enough to the truth to almost stand up in the light. But they never really do, because a thousand generalities do not add up to a single truth.
So I never went, partly because running has never been part of my make up. But mostly, it was because I didn’t believe, even though I really, really wanted to. I read all the books, took all the classes, met with all of these shit heads in person, but could never turn the corner and suspend my belief. I had an easier time believing in “knight Rider” than this. It’s the same reason no religion would have me. I do not believe in something that I cannot feel.
There I said it.
My spiritual beliefs are based on my intuitive reactions to a situation and I trust my intuition more then anything else on this plane. (Not that I always interpret them correctly).
So based on this, my search for god is one huge sham right?
Wrong.
We are a society who relies on the messenger more then the message. The messenger makes us feel the way we want to feel-not the message. The message just becomes a bunch of buzzwords that we can regurgitate for conversational use.
But the messenger gives us identity- a face we can think of when looking into the recesses of our hearts for our lives troubles. But the message is the thing that changes our lives.
It was during this era that I had my first encounter with my past lives and that changed me completely and forever. To be honest, I was not the tea totaling kind of guy I am now (Although I do like my cocktails). So a good majority of my time was spent in a drug induced fog. But I shared a visceral experience with another person that was impossible to debunk. A shared memory, where we both filled in the blanks of an image we saw independently.
Damn, if I didn’t try to debunk it. With all of my heart I tried to rip that shit to shreds, give reason or rhyme why we both remembered that. But the physical manifestations of that image changed how this person slept and what they feared. After this revelation, they no longer suffered from ill sleeping and could now sleep in all positions. (Where before sleeping on her back was impossible) and the errant pain of her abdomen ceased to exist.
For me, the flood-gates opened. I not only remembered that moment, but all of the moments that I had forgotten from my thousands of years of walking this amazing planet and I found my sense of god in it.
So when the exodus for Washington came, I no longer needed to believe nor cared to.
My eyes were opened to the flow of life. The cycles of birth death birth, pain joy pain so on and so forth. My eyes were open to the only metaphor that I can give about this:
We all live in the ocean of eternity. We are more then this manifestation currently, but cannot or at least have a hard time fathoming it. The responses of the heavens to our pleas are meaningless because the heavens are the waters of the ocean and they seem to do what they want.
So when my oracle reached into the ocean to pull out the cards I knew it was worth a listen. Maybe the oracle is right and maybe the oracle is wrong. All we can do is hang on to our surfboards and ride the waves as best as we can.
Selah
the rev
From Formlessness.
I would come in and out of my sleep/delirium/death/birth, millions upon millions of times, while I dwelt in the existence of the void. For countless ages I repeated the task, wondering if my existence had changed, and for those very same millions of times I fell back down into the black void, knowing nothing was different.
I didn’t care, because there was no reason to care. There was no reason for anything, because I, was all there was, and I, was not enough. I Wallowed in self pity, (One of the few items I am regretful of creating.) and cursed the day of my conscious birth.
Then abruptly, in one moment, a very singular moment, I felt a sense of pressure. I wondered how this could be since I was formless and alone. But never the less, there it was.
I tried to reason into the darkness, to understand what could have been there. And I came to realize that I had form! I was no longer an amorphous being. I could see into the darkness. I could hear the sound of the void and I could feel.
I was able to manifest form! I was able to manifest a physical sensation. But what was it that I was feeling? What was the mounting pressure that pulled me from the depths of the void?
Upon retrospect, it took me eons to realize that at this point in my existence, I had forged the form of man. That for some strange reason, of all the shapes, sizes, and infinite variations I could have become, I took a bipedal upright shape.
When I began to understand that I had form, I began to explore what my shape was. Was I large or small, was there a center for my consciousness or did it exist through out my form. Most importantly, what did I want to use it for? Reason would dictate what I needed in this existence, but it seemed to me that reason alone was not responsible for this change. No, this change was brought about by need, by circumstance, but mainly, by desire.
You see, the changes in me were brought about by my sheer force of will, because my circumstances were unbearable. Now the only question that remained was, what was I to do with this change? So I began to survey my parts. I had two arms, hands, fingers and a single torso. Although I wasn’t sure how I could use them in this existence, because there was nothing to grab or hold onto except for myself and oddly, that felt good. I had two legs that had feet on the end with what I called toes at the bottom. There was nowhere to run because there was nothing to run on. All items that would be useless to me in the void except save one, and apparently it was the only one that mattered. It seems that I gave myself a head and on this head I put eyes, ears, a nose and a mouth. And on the mouth is where I found the source of the pressure.
I could see nothing in front of me to cause the pressure, in fact I could see nothing at all in the void, just endless darkness and it again consumed me with grief. What was I to do with this manifestation if I was to be the only creature in existence? I would have drifted back down into the void again save for that little bit of pressure . It became a reason to stay. I had to find out the reason for the pressure, the reason I wanted to stay here in this existence.
Selah
The Telling.
I was very young when I first heard this tale. I was sitting on the deck of my first father’s boat, mindlessly drifting along an endless sea. In the days before Netfilx and Facebook, before TV and the written word, we used to amuse ourselves with the simple act of story telling.
First Father, who was a trader on the river before the deluge, would always have a few too many flagons of wine and would regale us with his stories and tall tales. He was a masterful storyteller and delivered his tales with great animation and enthusiasm. He would jump up and down on the deck and gesticulate like one of the wild creatures down below. We all would laugh at him and think he was a bit shikerd, but amusing none-the-less.
It was a simple time then, although I didn’t know it. We would spend our days fishing and waiting for landfall. We would spend our days in the company of love.
First Father would daydream during those languid days on the boat and in his dreams he would say that the creator spoke with him. Told him why we were spared and how we should live. The creator told him what the meaning of wicked was and what to do about it. The creator told him the stories of creation and why we were on this earth, this plane of existence. He said the creator spoke with him as I speak with you, personally and honestly with as much candor as one could muster. I never really believed him, but loved his stories so much, that I remember them all to this day. Ages later.
First mother said that he was a drunk and that he should go spend time with the animals below deck.
Our world at the time was one of confusion. There was war between the tribes and hatred among the clans. There was famine and starvation everywhere you looked, but we just called it life. It was a ruthless time with no saving graces except for love, and that was hard to come by.
When the rains came, First father told us it was the creator’s way of cleaning our land while guiding us toward a better future. We never understood what the word future even meant, but we helped First Father build his boat while we were mocked and scorned.
This was not an uncommon site for us. The townsfolk never liked First Father and only traded with him because he was the only one to carry the precious cargo of salt, down river.
The rains had cleansed the world but did not cleanse the souls of those he left on it.
Selah
Happy New Year to all of you.
May it be a prosperous and healthy year.
May your dreams be realized and your sorrows quelled.
I would like to take a moment to do some housekeeping-so to speak. First off, I would like all of you to come to my new website http://www.lordrifa.com to hear and see more of what you are hearing here. Please take the time to subscribe to it so we can send you updates on shows and such, and if you feel so inclined, like us on Facebook.
Secondly I want to change up the blog a bit. I have been in a story telling mood as of late, so that is what I will put up for the next while. Stories that with any luck have some moral fiber to them. (No telling whether I have had enough in my day to pass on!) First off, Meditations on a Cosmological Constant. A story of God’s Origin and I guess ours as well.
Enjoy
The Void
It was in the endless darkness that I became aware of my shortcomings. It was there, in that void, that I learned that: I was I, and I was Alone.
A unique being-the only being- in what seemed to be a hall of forever, because I never knew how long I was drifting there-if drifting is even the correct word. Yet, it seemed that being aware of myself, of my existence allowed me to be aware of what wasn’t part existence.
What was missing, from me.
I recognized that I could think, and reason. I recognized that I was the only one in this darkness and I reasoned that I did not like it. And it came to pass that I realized my feelings and I called them pain.
I didn’t know then what I know now. I didn’t know that all life is born from pain and that is a thing to be celebrated, not eschewed. I didn’t know that pain was part of the magnificent circle that I had created. I didn’t know any of it. I only knew what came with the pain, and that, was loneliness.
So Forever I drifted in and out of consciousness, together with my only companions-loneliness and pain. I drifted and I waited, I remembered and forgot, all the while becoming more aware of me. Of the things that I carried, from moment to moment, because that was all I had.
So I tried to picture me. What did I look like, what did I feel like, what did I even sound like. But it was all for naught because in a void, of nothing but me, there was nothing to see but me, so it did not matter.
At some point, this became an insurmountable block to my continued existence. I could no longer bare the pain of knowing without sharing. I could no longer be in an existence where I was the creator and the only being in that creation.
It was then that I discovered rage, I was then that I discovered anger, I was then that I discovered, that through my sheer force of will, I could manifest changes in myself. Changes in my existence that I never knew were possible.
I tried to imagine what my existence would be like with another one like me. If I could create another of me, would we be enough? Would we, soothe my soul?
I laughed at the idea of two of me and it caused me to create humor and I liked it. But two of me would be much more than I could handle. My sorrows would still be there, only twice manifest, because I am.
I am more then I understand and that would be too much of me. No, I needed something that would compliment me, something that I could share my understandings with, something that would challenge me to prove that my existence was worth more then my desire. Although I had not known at this point in my existence, that my desire was all that existed.
My existence was small and getting smaller by the moment. I lapsed more frequently into the unconscious abyss because I could no longer take the silence. Nothingness was better. The pain in me grew and grew til I could bear it no longer and in one massive burst of anger, and grief, I found my voice and screamed. I screamed for what seemed to be forever. I screamed with my desire for companionship. I screamed for my desire to share. I screamed with all of the rage loneliness that I could find, because I could. I discovered catharsis. It had left me drained and I discovered sleep.
Selah
The Reverend LordRifa 