Code Switching With “God”

If you can tell that someone doesn’t mean the same thing as you do when using the word “god,” you shouldn’t talk about it anymore.

Some people fluently code switch with the word “god,” and other people use the word “god” without ever having encountered the concept of code switching, so that can cause major problems.

My friend Nobu says code switching can “wear down those defaults as water erodes stone.”

This explains (to me, as I didn’t realize it consciously) my own practice of talking about “gods” with the person on my left and “God” with the person on my right all day long and saying things that completely contradict each other.

I have positioned myself in theological conversations with people in my intersecting cultures where my intellectual reaction is that all sides are simultaneously “wrong,” but what I’m actually doing is wearing down my own programming via erosion.

This is also true in the positive articulation. I go through a day affirming particular, localized divine intelligences and encompassing nonconceptual Divine Intelligence in rapid fluctuation — being unable to encompass it all myself, naturally — and it wears down all conception.

The social force of being received as a heretic is also part of the alchemy of this.

It’s koan practice, really. the crucible of unresolvable contradiction. I don’t punch out of that situation in the ejector seat of doctrine. Not my style.

Previous
Previous

Avraham Failed the Akeidah

Next
Next

Eclipses Are Disruptions