[The Rude Guy talks about God and fear, the roots of fear, the politics of fear, and how to rid yourself of fear.]
This is The Rude Guy, God’s pizza delivery boy, the ideology exterminator, the fly on the ceiling of your innermost fears, the religious zealot, whose only religion is: pursuit of the truth. Welcoming you to the Reality Cult. Presenting the Idea of the Week. Where we savor spiritual fruits, and pee on, religious nuts, whether their religion is fundamentalism, or FEMINISM.
Religious nuts, are the foghorns of fear, and they need to be UNplugged… But before we get to that, let’s kick off with a few words of wisdom.
Why do you worry about food?
Why do you worry about clothes?
Who feeds the birds of the sky?
Who clothes the flowers of the fields?
Which of you can add one day to your life by worrying?… Jesus of Nazareth
We’ve been asked by some listeners to do more shows about men and spiritual matters. In fact, if I was MARKeting this show, I would ONLY do shows on men’s issues, because it’s the men’s programs that sell the books and bring in the donations. But, to me, war and work, militarism and corporatism, are men’s issues too, and I cannot leave them alone. This show is NOT for dittoheads. If you listen to Rush Limbaugh, turn this off right now, you are NOT ALLOWED to listen to this podcast. And if you’re a woman, you better think twice about it. You are NOT going to like some of the things in this show. If you’ve got thin skin, if you’re feathers are easily ruffled, shut it off right now, and just go shopping.
However, what I do know is, the people who like this show REALLY like it. Someone who likes, and supports, the Democratic Party, SHOULD be sending me money, under the table, to carry on. But they’re too stupid, and too chicken-shit. They’re an elitist club of self-aggrandizing factions: women, blacks, gays. They don’t know how to throw some support to a white male heterosexual who’s battling their opposition. They never heard the thing about how the enemy of my enemy, is my friend. The Democrats will never win another election, until they address the problems of men. Divorce, downsizing, reverse sexism, reverse racism. They can’t just hang back, and let the Republicans self-destruct, and expect guys like me to make the effort to get to the polls, and vote for them. They’ve gotta make an effort too. They’ve got to come across with SOMEthing tangible.
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According to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, we have nothing to fear but fear itself. But you wouldn’t know that from listening to OUR potato-head president.
His entire administration is fueled by fear. Why would George Bush want to CATCH Osama? He needs Osama as much as Osama needs him.
The entire reason we’re in Iraq, is fear. Seventeen Saudis and two Pakistanis bomb the World Trade Center, and two and a half years later we invade Iraq. Fear. That makes as much sense as if… Canada invaded Michigan, so we flew over and bombed Paris, because there are some Frenchmen living in Canada too. Get it?… I don’t.
The amazing thing is, nothing the Republicans promise us EVER comes to pass. Nothing. Ever. They’re gonna bring ethics back into government, then they cheat and lie and steal, and stink up the Congress like dead carp, floating belly up, in the swamp of their corruption. They vow they’re gonna have an open administration, then choke off press access, and feed the media a stream of strategic, self-serving, diversionary leaks, on anyone from Valerie Plame to Osama bin Laden. They’re gonna stimulate the free market, so they give special exemptions and no-bid contracts to huge corporations, which gives the big guys UNfair advantages, and allows them to smash competitors and deMOLISH the free market. They’re gonna STRICTLY follow the Constitution, then they spy on us, without telling us… and lie about that. They’re gonna obey the teachings of Jesus, then they murder 100,000 Iraqi civilians in his name. These people are SOCIOpaths. They don’t even NOtice a disconnect here. There philosophy is to win at ANY cost. ANY cost.
The party of saying one thing, and doing the polar opposite, is called the Republicans. You have to be really fucking brain dead to vote for Republicans. You have to have thoroughly lost your soul to vote for Republicans.
They only have one thing that works… Making us afraid. They’re very successful at that. They’re the door-to-door salesmen of terror. The ice-cream men of Fear.
We’re afraid of terrorists, and high gas prices, and missing our mortgage payment. Afraid of losing our jobs, and losing our kids. Afraid of looking uncool, or of not being liked. Afraid of not passing the test, and not making the grade. We’re always on edge, always afraid. We’ve manufactured a high tech society that runs on fear.
And the Idea of the week this week is: How do we get rid of fear?…
How do we get rid of fear?…
Fear is lack of faith. Ultimately… we are afraid… because we lack a genuine LIVING faith, to anchor our lives, in the swiftly changing, socio-political currents, of our era.
Where animals have it all above humans is, they do not fear. Not like WE do. If you shoot at a deer and miss, it will run away, and go back to grazing, alertly, but peacefully, ten minutes later. It won’t kneel down in a cold sweat, imagining what would have happened, if it had been standing three feet to the left. Animals do not reason abstractly… and they do not fear abstractly. Our human brains are so big… literally SO big… that we simultaneously enjoy fantastic imaginations, AND are crippled by fantastic, imaginary fears.
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There are two important things to know about life.
One… nothing EVER works out the way it’s supposed to.
Two… everything ALWAYS works out the way it’s supposed to.
This is called a paradox, and since the totality of life cannot be grasped by the human mind – our science cannot understand it, our language cannot understand it – our best bet for understanding life, our most accurate description, comes to us via Paradox. Light is both a particle and a wave, kind of thing. You gotta give it away, to keep it, kind of thing.
Our problem is, we insist on believing that the basis of everything is physical, and rational, when NOTHING is physical, and NOTHING is rational. Might as well believe, eggs grow on trees. That’s a chronically feminized, materialistic, way of thinking, and we are ALL suffering greatly because of it.
Mater, the Latin word for mother, is the root word of materialism. We inhabit an impossibly feminized society, where ALL the contours of thought are lensed through female modes of perception… What are female modes of perception? A blind faith in materialistic solutions to EVERYthing, love of rules and regulations, and an insistence, on making literal sense out of everything.
But materialistic solutions usually suck, and rules and regulations choke human invention, and things DON’T make literal sense. They never have and never will. Don’t believe ME, study quantum mechanics. Nothing is physical, and nothing is rational. And formulaic feel-good answers, obscure genuine thought, and thereby DIVERT us from finding satisfactory solutions, and lead directly to the mass angst that causes fear, war and global suffering.
The feminization of human society, is really really hurtful. There’s NOTHING good about it. The unintended consequences of Feminism, are a disaster. At the moment the Democrats are being led by Hilary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi. What do THEY stand for? A woman’s right to choose? Funding for schools? Look… we’re in a war in Iraq, and neither of them have the BALLS to step up, and say we need to get the fuck out of there, right now. We don’t need negotiation and compromise and looking good in front of cameras… we need leadership. And this is precisely the problem. At the very historical moment, when the political stage is CRYING OUT for LEADERSHIP, we get blandishments and touchy feely consensus, offered up by handsome women, and cautious FEMINIZED men. These effeminate, do-nothing fools enlarge our fears, instead of relieving them.
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Back to our paradox, which is mostly just a linguistic puzzle…But it bears hidden spiritual fruit.
One… nothing EVER works out the way it’s supposed to.
Two… everything ALWAYS works out the way it’s supposed to.
Nothing EVER works out the way WE want it to.
Everything ALWAYS works out the way GOD wants it to. Understanding this simple idea, is the clue to banishing fear.
We don’t run the universe. We don’t run our own lives. Much less the lives of the people around us. And when we forget that, when we delude ourselves into believing we have some control over this mess, that’s when the fear creeps in, and eats our brain.
We are ALL disabled by fear. We are all in need of a welfare check, from the Big Guy in the Sky. The Infinite Pizza. The Italian Sausage from Vatican City. The Biggest Cheese of all.
The antidote to fear, is surrender to God.
The antidote to fear, is surrender to God. The Life Force. The Supreme Consciousness. The Infinite Pizza.
When I’m fearful I pray. What do I pray for? I pray to UNDERSTAND god’s will, the will of the universe. And to get my life IN LINE with it.
Maybe the cause of your fear is, you’re not doing what you’re SUPPOSED to be doing. Maybe you’re not supposed to keep working a shit job, making mortgage payments on a suburban house. Maybe you’re supposed to lose your house, and start a campaign against depleted uranium, the radioactive ammunition used by our tank crews, that has crippled Iraqi and Bosnian children, and the unborn children of U.S. soldiers who served in Iraq one, and two, and Bosnia… and has even crippled and killed, OUR SOLDIERS themselves. Depleted Uranium bunker busters, vaporize on impact, into radioactive dust, that’s inhaled by unsuspecting lungs downwind, where it begins its evil work. Our soldiers called it Gulf War Syndrome, but Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld don’t care. It’s a crime and an outrage that we use this weapon, and it must be stopped.
Or maybe you should go on a campaign to bring Jesus back into Christianity. That would be nice. You wanna be a Christian? You can’t kill anybody. Or Impeach Bush and Cheney. Or CONVICT Bush and Cheney… and Alberto Gonzalez too. Why not? They’re all crooks. Or kick corporate lobbyists out of Washington D.C. Or raise money for Mother Teresa’s Sisters of Charity.
If your ONLY goal in life is to fit into an INSANE society, guess what’s gonna happen to you?
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There are two ways to vanquish fear. One is to attack the source of the fear, and the other is to attack the fear itself.
Let’s say you’re afraid of dogs. You could GUN DOWN every dog you see. OR, you could work on shrinking your fear of dogs.
Dogs are a pretty good example to use for this. If a dog senses fear in you,
it will be MUCH more likely to attack you. But if you exude confidence, the OPPOSITE of fear, then you have NOTHING to fear from the dog. It becomes a furry boom box. A barking head, on a string.
So how can we learn to… “exude confidence?” Here’s the paradox. Exuding confidence has NOTHING to do with enlarging your ego, and everything to do with shrinking your ego. Nothing to do with self-importance, everything to do with humility. If you are humble, you cannot be ridiculed. If you’ve got a small ego, you cannot be shamed. People think that confident people are bursting with ego, but that’s completely wrong. Confident people have NO ego.
Getting rid of fear is getting rid of ego. Getting rid of Self. The really important thing about spiritual growth, is it teaches us, that, although we can make decisions about our lives, we are not in CONTROL of how those decisions play out. We are not in control of what happens.
As the Hindus teach in the Bhagavad Gita: Act, but let go of the results of your actions.
Act, but LET GO of the results of your actions.
The key to living without fear is, to let go of the very FALSE idea, that you are supposed to try and control, ALL the events of your life.
So who’s gonna control them? George Bush and Dick Cheney? No thanks. I wake up every day and spend a few hours trying to Impeach Bush and Cheney, and Condoleeza and Gonzalez too. People tell me that won’t happen. I TELL them, that in three years Bush’s approval rating has dropped from 90% to 30%. I tell them, that with those numbers, there’s NO WAY he can invade Iran or North Korea or Venezuela, or fuck with Social Security. Sometimes, if you ask for the WHOLE world, you only get HALF, and that’s good enough. I want these guys STOPPED in their tracks. No more presidential initiatives. NO more Bush-shit.
There’s a good point Rich Zubaty brings up in his book: What Men Know That Women Don’t. Sez he: the fatal flaw of feminism, is that it encourages women to “take control of their lives”. That’s the express train, into chaos, and insecurity, and nameless fears. That’s the polar OPposite of what every spiritual tradition teaches. “My body my business”, they rant. And then, because they THINK, they are supposed to be IN CONTROL of everything, just by WILLING IT to be so, and because that can NEVER EVER happen in THIS time/space continuum, they are racked by CONSTANT fear, and insecurity. The real problem with feminism, is that it has herded women off the cliff of spiritual disaster. It’s a mushroom cloud of willfulness. A galaxy of nameless fears. Aren’t people sick and tired of Judge Judy, and her clones? The female judges who SCREAM at the litigants in their courtrooms. Jewish mother as judge, jury and prosecutor… forcing HER values ON the rest of the us? It’s barbaric. That shit went out with Abraham. That’s why they wrote the Bible in the first place. To shut these bitches up. Judge Judy can’t stop the war… or give us healthcare, or even fix a running toilet, so she’s gonna YELL at some Latino kid, who’s got no job, because he didn’t pay child support. What cowshit. What nerve-wracking delusion.
Spiritual surrender, NOT willfulness, is the key to living without fear… It’s not easy to learn that. You have to sweat through it… Cry your way through it… And have some faith that eventually, it WILL work…
It’s counter intuitive… In that moment, when I feel WRETCHED, and I’m praying, or meditating just to get through the pain, that’s when I’m making the MOST progress. But it sure doesn’t FEEL like it, at the time. I’ve only learned that, by repeating this experiment, over and over again.
Sometimes I do a Buddhist meditation I learned in Thailand, to empty myself of myself, empty myself of my ego, and therefore let go of my fear… Fear is ego and ego is fear. But if I’m really stressed, and can’t stop to mediate, I uncork a short prayer, “God let me do your work today, not my work. Let me do the things you want done, not the things I want done. And please let me always remember to be grateful.”
That’s it. That’s the prayer I use to empty myself of fear. Sometimes it works a lot, sometimes it works a little. But it ALWAYS works, at least a little. It’s not a cop out, or escape from reality. It’s making good use, of the very scientific fact, that I am but a bit player, in an enormous universe. I don’t HAVE to control everything. And anyway, I can’t. And as long as I remember that, and honor it, I’m OK. But if I lose sight of it, my self-delusion, plunges me into fear.
“God let me do your work today, not my work. Let me do the things you want done, not the things I want done. And please let me always remember to be grateful.”
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Here are two immutable laws of the universe. We don’t know why either of them works… we just know they do… they ALWAYS work.
Number one: drop your pencil and gravity sucks onto the floor
Number two: Pray to God and your pain goes away.
The both work… all the time. Pretty amazing.
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It’s been said that fear is lack of Faith. I believe that. Fear is overblown ego, and overblown ego is: easing god out.
It’s been said, the enemy is not pain but FEAR of pain. I believe that too.
Most of us can TRANSCEND fear, when we have to handle IMMEDIATE crises. Tense scenes, happening right in front of our faces. What gets us bent out of shape is, ANTICIPATING bad things. IMAGINING bad things. FERTILIZING our fears… One thing I have learned to tell myself is: if it’s not happening right now, RIGHT NOW, it’s NOT HAPPENING… Fear is actually a species of superstition.
Fear leads directly to hate. We hate what we fear. We are in Iraq right now because we FEAR. And because we hate. Very very UNchristian.
For millennia, mystics from ALL religions, have led the way, in banishing fear. Praying, meditating, moving their egos outSIDE their bodies. Sometimes when I need to get out of my SELF, I imagine that I’m a fly on the ceiling, looking down at my self. What I’m angling for is some DISTANCE from my SELF. That’s the key to eliminating fear. NOT loving my self. NOT accepting my self. Getting RID of my self. That’s how you conquer fear.
Here’s another quote from What Men Know That Women Don’t, by Rich Zubaty. It’s about saints… wise men:
Saints are comfortable knowing, and they are comfortable NOT knowing. They can care, and not care, without guilt. They can act with success, because they have named their Fear of Failure… they have NAMED their Fear of Failure. They know the worst that can happen to them, and they are NOT afraid of it. They are NOT attached to the results of their actions. They do not need to affirm or deny, judge or ignore, but they are free to do them all, with impunity.
According to Mother Teresa:
We become LESS fearful by helping those, who are MORE fearful. We become LESS fearful, by helping those who are MORE fearful. That’s pretty much how she spent her entire life.
In their Daily Prayers, Mother Teresa’s Sisters of Charity ask that they be delivered: quote
From the FEAR of being humiliated,
From the FEAR of being despised,
From the FEAR of suffering rebukes,
From the fear of being slandered,
From the fear of being forgotten,
From the fear of being wronged,
From the fear of being ridiculed,
From the fear of being suspected.
Notice that these NUNS are not asking to be free, of humiliation and slander and rebuke, but only from the FEAR of being humiliated and slandered and rebuked…
I’m a BIG believer in LITTLE prayers. Here’s another one I say, when I need a quick shot of relief, from fear or stress.
“Dear God, please let me rest in your hands. Please let me rest in your hands.”
That’s it. That’s the entire prayer. It’s just an image. Just an imagining. I picture myself curling up, and going to sleep inside two giant cupped hands. It works for me. “Please let me rest in your hands.” I’m asking the Father of Creation to let me curl up in his strong hands. Suspend me above the cruelty of the material world, and the madness of my fears. Just for a moment. Just so I can grab a moment of peace.
Bless you. And remember, a blessing is not just a pat on the head from a priest. A blessing is a GIFT of strength. When you are served God’s blessing, you are really being FED his strength.
So Bless you… From The Infinite Pizza… the Biggest Cheese of all…
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If you wanna download some free songs and pictures… and some laughs… go to therudeguy.com… or… Rich Zubaty’s Web Site, happyfool.org… and click on the links. Rich Zubaty is my friend, and sponsor of this show. He’s a deliriously Happy fool, all right. Also, at happyfool.org, he’s got a web page, with a collection of… “words of wisdom”… excerpted from his spiritual book: Water People.
Check it out. Buy a book, buy the Corporate Vampires DVD. Donate a few bucks. By helping him, you’re helping me.
And remember, if you haven’t heard our first 21 shows, you’ve MISSED something. They have NOT gone out of date, because this is NOT radio. This is the show that’s about ideas, not issues, not opinions. Ideas. And ideas never die.
Go to therudeguy.com and, on the right hand side of the page, click on the archives, listed by the months. Start with January and work your way up. Laugh, while you learn.
And email me. therudeguy@hotmail.com EMAIL me. So I know I’m not just talking to snickering spies, for Rush Limbaugh, and Homeland Security.
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And now some final words of wisdom:
Heaven does nothing
Earth does nothing
From the union of these,
all things proceed,
all things are made.
Heaven and earth do nothing,
yet there is nothing they do not do…
Chang Tzu
This is The Rude Guy. We’ll be back. Stay strong. Don’t let anybody intimidate you. Don’t let anybody shame you. No more bullshit. That’s our motto…. No more BULLssshhhiiittt.
Ahhhh, feels a little better already.
