Excerpts from “Wandering in the Spirit” by Leo Downey 11/12As I mentioned in a previous post, I grew up with a genius in the top 99.999 percentile of world iq, 156. They think Einstein was 160. He can’t remember he’s a genius anymore and when he could he never mentioned it and didn’t care. All I did besides loving my Dad was ask him questions and I’ve never stopped. I found out that what a genius does is, ”Pay attention.” Paying attention is not a linear
activity, it is quantum, and is what “Wandering in the Spirit” is, it might seem like I’m wandering when you read what I write, I am, it’s the only way I’ve found here to truth. The answers my Dad gave me didn’t matter nearly as much as how he found them and expressed them. He taught me about the natural world and the world of man, but mostly he taught me, “How to think.” It was important to him that we be intellectually honest and it bothered him when we were not, it bothers me too. The least important part of our intelligence is our knowledge. The most important part is our commitment to truth. The way truth reveals itself and proves it is true is by way of its meaning, find more of one and you find more of the other. How can I have ‘more’ truth if I believe truth is never relative? Truth is a person, like love, like tracks on a path that lead you somewhere new. Each track is true, but it takes all the tracks to reveal the never-ending fullness of truth.
You can use a metaphor just because it works and waste words, but when words lose their meaning, when their symbolism is usurped and wasted by the culture that uses them as they do today, metaphor can illuminate meaning, the reason for words in the first place. What we think is not as important as why we think it. What we do is not as important as why we do it. You’ll find truth when you stop asking yourself whether it’s true or not and keep asking yourself what it means.I want to share the beauty of the tracks I see, have seen and will see, with you, but I see with each one I express to you that it can’t and I can’t reveal the fullness of its beauty unless I express the beauty of each one that came before and even the ones that will come. The name for that is, “Honoring My Ancestors.” I will honor mine because it is beautiful and because by doing so I honor myself and I honor you. I want to share the tracks I see with you, I’m dying to, it almost killed me not to. My ancestors have said in different ways, a man that does not live his vision is a walking dead man and as always they are right, they can actually be relied on, you know why? Because they have honored their ancestors in a way that avoids laying a false track, they are intellectually honest and their intent is for the meaning of truth. The path has already been broken the tracks are already there. When you ‘Wander in the Spirit’ you never take a step that’s not a prayer and we can do it and be fully human and even fall, I’m living proof. We can get as far off the path as we have to, we can be ambushed by lions and run, we can walk among painful hypocrites like the guy in the orchestra (refer to previous post) and be John, but we can’t follow the guys tracks without dishonoring our own and our ancestors, that is called, “Tradition.” Tradition has become a bad word because there is not enough of it left for anybody to remember what it means. The way you can tell the difference between the tracks left by the guy in the orchestra and John’s is that John’s tracks go all the way back to the first track left by the first ancestor, our Father who art in heaven, and what you read in the guy in the orchestra’s track is totally inconsistent with the meaning revealed in the tracks of every ancestor that went before him. Your welcome to follow the guy, but if you do you’re dumb because he’s a liar. We don’t have to be smart, but we sure don’t have to be dumb.Like both of my parents in their mid forties I began to not just pray to, meaning love, a false god, but worship it. Mine was alcohol, and like both my parents in their mid forties, I recognized it for what it was and eventually no longer wanted it at all, but it was much harder than I though it would be and it tried to kill me. Every god creates in its own image and demands our total sacrifice, because what we love we become. If you’re addicted to anything there is so much I have to share with you about what I learned from it. I use the word, “Have” because it is a duty not an option. There is so much I wish I would have known when I was in its awful grip. What demons and false gods do ultimately to their demise is teach you that God is real, that’s why they always lie and hide and by the way, as usual it’s the opposite of what the world says about them. Believing in them doesn’t make them real, it makes them go away.Overcoming ‘sin’ or a desire for something other than true love is not about resisting a temptation. I knew that when I left the world and the music business and stopped sleeping with women I wasn’t willing to live and die for. It was like psychic surgery and celibacy is not my, ‘Calling’ like the priesthood, an honor I’ve been asked to but never called to and my ancestors never, ever ordained themselves. I don’t mean to the general service of others, I mean to the living sacrifice and authority of a timeless and eternal throne. Celibacy is as misunderstood as a real priest, and a malicious lie proven by every fact and statistic is that it turns a man gay or into a pedophile. 2.8 percent of priests molested 86 percent teenage young men, and as for those I’ve met and intend to tell you about later, they ‘ordained’ themselves, ask the guy in the orchestra and his allies about that. The chance of being molested in your own home or in school is up to five times greater. The guy in the orchestra and his allies joined for all the wrong reasons and the reason I got so pissed off that I had to leave the orchestra or I was going to beat the shit out of the guy and his allies is because of the malicious evil they do to men like John, real priests, medicine men. It’s one thing to destroy the reputation of a liar and another to destroy the reputation of a man that tells the truth. They commit the only unforgivable sin, one you don’t want to forgiven for. Their sins aren’t any worse than yours or mine, it’s their hypocrisy that has to be stood up to. The intent for celibacy out of marriage allowed me to be willing to live and die for every woman and to be their friend, their real friend. How did I do it and why? Because my ancestors, the tracks, and above all, a Virgin, revealed to me what I could have if I ‘wanted’ it, if I wanted to believe with them in a beauty and a love that made everything else pale and even ugly. I saw what a woman was and I wanted her and I still do. For me the meaning and beauty of making love with a woman cannot be expressed in its fullness unless it is expressed by both of us as a sacrament of our shared faith, then it is everything. I want to honor my woman and my ancestors. There is no creature more beautiful than a woman. I hope someday one finds herself and shows her beauty to others and to me too, so we can all respond to it, that would be a work of art. It’s not what she will do it’s who she will be and no matter what she has done or has been done to her, if she has the passion of Mary, she will never lose her virginity.When you track you don’t just keep your nose to the ground, you get up high and look all around, you ask yourself, if I were a lion where would I go? And it is absolutely beautiful and fun! Trying to show you the beauty I see is art and it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done. First I have to stop looking for anything else, stop wanting anything else, and look for the meaning beauty reveals.
Believing in God isn’t really about morality and virtue, but those are techniques and consequences. Believing is not something I do because I think I’ll get in trouble if I don’t or a thing that people refuse to do because they say, well if that’s that way it is, I won’t! It’s not Jesus saying, “Eat your vegetables!” It’s a desire for beauty and the meaning beauty reveals, it’s a desire for love and to know what love is. What makes anything ultimately true or false is its meaningfulness or meaninglessness. Your “Faith” is what you believe and why, it’s different from your faithfulness. Your faithfulness is your love and sincerity and universal to sincere people and all holy faiths. Your, “Faith” is your religion, what you believe about the ultimate nature of reality, and whether you are aware of it or not, your reality. I’ll here people say, well what we believe is not really that important as long as we agree on some generalities and get along. That’s like saying, it’s all music, it’s all art, who cares. Brothercanyaspareadime! It’s not mean, it’s not unloving, it’s just dumb. Why on Earth would you want, to want to believe in something that was meaning-less? What beauty does that reveal? Don’t you see that Beauty, Meaning and Truth are all the same thing? Or am I wrong? I don’t mind being wrong and if I am I want you to tell me with love. Explain to me precisely, beautifully and meaningfully why it’s better for me to believe something that means less and is less beautiful than what I see? Why? Because you think what’s more beautiful and more meaningful isn’t true and I’ll get in trouble for believing it? “Good Lord,” as I love to hear my bass player friend Vince say. I say, for heavens sake, what the frickin’ point? It’s my God’s responsibility to be as beautiful and meaningful as he can be or he’s just another false god. What I find in my Faith is that it allows me to be more of who I am, in every way, more a man; sexually, romantically, artistically, intellectually and spiritually.The grass consumes the sun, it rises up alive buried in and born again of its mother, Earth. It is innocent, true to its nature, it praises light and is filled with it. The sun its soul, the Earth its flesh. Its waves are blades of wind wolves and the air it breathes God’s breath.
The deer consumes the beauty, it’s whole life and being is the living creation of God, it has never sinned, never gone against its own nature. It pays attention like a genius, it springs like steel, its tracks tell a story of beauty and so do the tracks of the lion and the man that kills it and consumes beauty with it.
I can’t see it unless I believe in it. To believe in it means to love it and become like it, that is ‘morality’ how can I say I recognize beauty and choose ugliness? If I consume it in vain, I bring condemnation upon myself, and I am unlike the beauty I consume. Ungrateful in grace I miss everything and forget who I am. Everybody can believe and do whatever they want. When I consume Jesus, I consume God’s Beauty and remember who I am.
You can use a metaphor just because it works and waste words, but when words lose their meaning, when their symbolism is usurped and wasted by the culture that uses them as they do today, metaphor can illuminate meaning, the reason for words in the first place. What we think is not as important as why we think it. What we do is not as important as why we do it. You’ll find truth when you stop asking yourself whether it’s true or not and keep asking yourself what it means.I want to share the beauty of the tracks I see, have seen and will see, with you, but I see with each one I express to you that it can’t and I can’t reveal the fullness of its beauty unless I express the beauty of each one that came before and even the ones that will come. The name for that is, “Honoring My Ancestors.” I will honor mine because it is beautiful and because by doing so I honor myself and I honor you. I want to share the tracks I see with you, I’m dying to, it almost killed me not to. My ancestors have said in different ways, a man that does not live his vision is a walking dead man and as always they are right, they can actually be relied on, you know why? Because they have honored their ancestors in a way that avoids laying a false track, they are intellectually honest and their intent is for the meaning of truth. The path has already been broken the tracks are already there. When you ‘Wander in the Spirit’ you never take a step that’s not a prayer and we can do it and be fully human and even fall, I’m living proof. We can get as far off the path as we have to, we can be ambushed by lions and run, we can walk among painful hypocrites like the guy in the orchestra (refer to previous post) and be John, but we can’t follow the guys tracks without dishonoring our own and our ancestors, that is called, “Tradition.” Tradition has become a bad word because there is not enough of it left for anybody to remember what it means. The way you can tell the difference between the tracks left by the guy in the orchestra and John’s is that John’s tracks go all the way back to the first track left by the first ancestor, our Father who art in heaven, and what you read in the guy in the orchestra’s track is totally inconsistent with the meaning revealed in the tracks of every ancestor that went before him. Your welcome to follow the guy, but if you do you’re dumb because he’s a liar. We don’t have to be smart, but we sure don’t have to be dumb.Like both of my parents in their mid forties I began to not just pray to, meaning love, a false god, but worship it. Mine was alcohol, and like both my parents in their mid forties, I recognized it for what it was and eventually no longer wanted it at all, but it was much harder than I though it would be and it tried to kill me. Every god creates in its own image and demands our total sacrifice, because what we love we become. If you’re addicted to anything there is so much I have to share with you about what I learned from it. I use the word, “Have” because it is a duty not an option. There is so much I wish I would have known when I was in its awful grip. What demons and false gods do ultimately to their demise is teach you that God is real, that’s why they always lie and hide and by the way, as usual it’s the opposite of what the world says about them. Believing in them doesn’t make them real, it makes them go away.Overcoming ‘sin’ or a desire for something other than true love is not about resisting a temptation. I knew that when I left the world and the music business and stopped sleeping with women I wasn’t willing to live and die for. It was like psychic surgery and celibacy is not my, ‘Calling’ like the priesthood, an honor I’ve been asked to but never called to and my ancestors never, ever ordained themselves. I don’t mean to the general service of others, I mean to the living sacrifice and authority of a timeless and eternal throne. Celibacy is as misunderstood as a real priest, and a malicious lie proven by every fact and statistic is that it turns a man gay or into a pedophile. 2.8 percent of priests molested 86 percent teenage young men, and as for those I’ve met and intend to tell you about later, they ‘ordained’ themselves, ask the guy in the orchestra and his allies about that. The chance of being molested in your own home or in school is up to five times greater. The guy in the orchestra and his allies joined for all the wrong reasons and the reason I got so pissed off that I had to leave the orchestra or I was going to beat the shit out of the guy and his allies is because of the malicious evil they do to men like John, real priests, medicine men. It’s one thing to destroy the reputation of a liar and another to destroy the reputation of a man that tells the truth. They commit the only unforgivable sin, one you don’t want to forgiven for. Their sins aren’t any worse than yours or mine, it’s their hypocrisy that has to be stood up to. The intent for celibacy out of marriage allowed me to be willing to live and die for every woman and to be their friend, their real friend. How did I do it and why? Because my ancestors, the tracks, and above all, a Virgin, revealed to me what I could have if I ‘wanted’ it, if I wanted to believe with them in a beauty and a love that made everything else pale and even ugly. I saw what a woman was and I wanted her and I still do. For me the meaning and beauty of making love with a woman cannot be expressed in its fullness unless it is expressed by both of us as a sacrament of our shared faith, then it is everything. I want to honor my woman and my ancestors. There is no creature more beautiful than a woman. I hope someday one finds herself and shows her beauty to others and to me too, so we can all respond to it, that would be a work of art. It’s not what she will do it’s who she will be and no matter what she has done or has been done to her, if she has the passion of Mary, she will never lose her virginity.When you track you don’t just keep your nose to the ground, you get up high and look all around, you ask yourself, if I were a lion where would I go? And it is absolutely beautiful and fun! Trying to show you the beauty I see is art and it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done. First I have to stop looking for anything else, stop wanting anything else, and look for the meaning beauty reveals.
Believing in God isn’t really about morality and virtue, but those are techniques and consequences. Believing is not something I do because I think I’ll get in trouble if I don’t or a thing that people refuse to do because they say, well if that’s that way it is, I won’t! It’s not Jesus saying, “Eat your vegetables!” It’s a desire for beauty and the meaning beauty reveals, it’s a desire for love and to know what love is. What makes anything ultimately true or false is its meaningfulness or meaninglessness. Your “Faith” is what you believe and why, it’s different from your faithfulness. Your faithfulness is your love and sincerity and universal to sincere people and all holy faiths. Your, “Faith” is your religion, what you believe about the ultimate nature of reality, and whether you are aware of it or not, your reality. I’ll here people say, well what we believe is not really that important as long as we agree on some generalities and get along. That’s like saying, it’s all music, it’s all art, who cares. Brothercanyaspareadime! It’s not mean, it’s not unloving, it’s just dumb. Why on Earth would you want, to want to believe in something that was meaning-less? What beauty does that reveal? Don’t you see that Beauty, Meaning and Truth are all the same thing? Or am I wrong? I don’t mind being wrong and if I am I want you to tell me with love. Explain to me precisely, beautifully and meaningfully why it’s better for me to believe something that means less and is less beautiful than what I see? Why? Because you think what’s more beautiful and more meaningful isn’t true and I’ll get in trouble for believing it? “Good Lord,” as I love to hear my bass player friend Vince say. I say, for heavens sake, what the frickin’ point? It’s my God’s responsibility to be as beautiful and meaningful as he can be or he’s just another false god. What I find in my Faith is that it allows me to be more of who I am, in every way, more a man; sexually, romantically, artistically, intellectually and spiritually.The grass consumes the sun, it rises up alive buried in and born again of its mother, Earth. It is innocent, true to its nature, it praises light and is filled with it. The sun its soul, the Earth its flesh. Its waves are blades of wind wolves and the air it breathes God’s breath.
The deer consumes the beauty, it’s whole life and being is the living creation of God, it has never sinned, never gone against its own nature. It pays attention like a genius, it springs like steel, its tracks tell a story of beauty and so do the tracks of the lion and the man that kills it and consumes beauty with it.
I can’t see it unless I believe in it. To believe in it means to love it and become like it, that is ‘morality’ how can I say I recognize beauty and choose ugliness? If I consume it in vain, I bring condemnation upon myself, and I am unlike the beauty I consume. Ungrateful in grace I miss everything and forget who I am. Everybody can believe and do whatever they want. When I consume Jesus, I consume God’s Beauty and remember who I am.
