There is a saying from the wisdom of Proverbs that says, "Happy is a man who is always afraid."
Now how can this be so?
I for one fear nothing I can see with my eyes, except perhaps great heights. Even so I jumped from an airplane more than twenty times without ever having to be pushed, unlike some others I had considered braver than me.
And when I close my eyes, nothing I see frightens me. So why should I be happy to be afraid, no less than all the time? Afraid of what?
The fact is, I am afraid all the time and happy it is so.
I am truly afraid of nothing but an invisible and formless idea in my mind, the contemplation of which can make me literally tremble and shake with vibrations that emanate from the void, in which this idea resides.
The idea is my ever oscillating and reverberating concept of Allah.
Allah who says of Himself to Moses, in response to Moses requesting His Name, this so as to identify for The Children of Israel, The Name of The God who was sending them their awaited Messiah, Moses, and so Allah calls Himself, "I Will Be What I Will Be!"
Future tense.
Anything I think of God is founded on experiences I have already have. Things I have seen for myself or heard of from what is recorded as history, what we call the "past". I have in my own past, read books written by other people who had their own experiences which caused them to contemplate God in their own way, which never satisfied me. Probably because their ideas were all founded on experiences they didn't share, rather they wrote only of their contemplation and the evolving concepts, which must have been abstracted from experiences I knew nothing of.
I did understand that the essence of any valuable wisdom must be founded on experience. It is experience that refines intelligence into wisdom.
Now I was born into a generation, this time, which celebrates the idea that God has died or that there is no God.
Many ideas of God that Jews had, went up in smoke out of the chimneys of death camps like Auschwitz. Hypocritical and Idolatrous Christianity had given God and His Son and The Holy Ghost, somehow one and the same, a very bad name. In the west, Islam was seen as a primitive religion. The Hebrew Bible's God had gotten misunderstood by the Jews, who carried His Contract with them and studied it, even when doing so might mean being burnt at the stake. They took The Hebrew Bible and their Talmud, the so called Oral Laws based on The Bible, wherever they were forced to live, reading from it all the time. They founded their whole religion from the book that condemned them to death if they didn't hear His Voice and hearken to what he says, and they had been being murdered and tortured and segregated into impoverished Ghettos by Christians, for many centuries.
Obviously they didn't hear His Voice or refused to do what He told them to, if He Existed at all, as they professed to believe. They certainly demonstrated on many occasions, death defying steadfast loyalty.
But it seemed to be of no avail.
They weren't redeemed, their Messiah didn't come, for nearly two thousand years, until finally in an age of enlightenment, many newly secular and educated Jews saw no God in the new light of the scientific method, and took matters into their own hands to save themselves from further persecution and Pogroms.
Modern secular Zionism was born. Most religious Jews who insisted redemption would come only as The awaited Son of David, prayed for The Messiah and stayed where they were, only to have their ideas of God go up in smoke with the ashes of their incinerated bodies, twirling around in the air with the ashes of their wives and baby children. Religious Jews in Arab countries in the middle east, were expelled from their homes without their property and means of livelihood and came to Israel impoverished and without the western education needed to get a decent job in Israel after the Holocaust.
Simply put, God had Gotten Himself a very bad reputation for many Jews and many people in the western world. In China He completely ceased to exist and communists all over the word declared that Religion and hence the concept of God, was nothing but an opium pipe dream.
The State of Israel was founded mostly by secular Jews, many of whom were communists or socialist atheists. Despite all this, my own experiences when I began to think about God for myself, were from watching my father the Rabbi return to his Faith and vocation after having mostly abandoned a religious way of life in my childhood. He seemed to be incredibly Blessed and serendipity was evident in his favor, in the most outrageous ways. His Hebrew Named was Baruch, which means simply "Blessed!"
It is from the coalescence of all these impressions that began to emerge an idea of what "I Will Be What I Will Be" means.
It obviously doesn't mean one who seeks a good reputation. It obviously doesn't mean, one to to be confined by expectations of How he should behave. It obviously doesn't mean a Creator with any kind of predictable character in what He causes to become reality for His Living Creations.
The Hebrew Bible describes God as merciful to those who worship in truth. Were all those ultra orthodox Jews who sang of the coming of the Messiah as they waited in line for a shower of deadly gas, lying when they prayed? I now believe he was merciful to them.
From within, as he has so often been merciful to me, despite anything anyone else would think of some of my experiences, when seen from the outside. God's mercy manifests for me not so much in the absence of adversity, to the contrary, that is when it is most evident and expedient but only in a way no one else can see, unless they see the twinkle in my eyes as I am being tied to a bed in an insane asylum for no real reason other than I insulted a male nurse by telling him he had no respect for my nakedness, as he burst into the showers and I felt I deserved more respect.
I did spray him for just a second with water. Nothing else. I was fed and then tied to a bed in a room alone, given a shot in the ass and then fell into a deep sleep while hallucinating I had been forgotten in another dimension and would never be found, this the final fate of my career as The Messiah. I didn't deny for a moment that I am The Messiah. I simply decided not to say or do anything ever again to promote the idea. My resolve disappeared the moment I heard a voice in me whisper, "Jonathan, now is the time to leave!" and I did run away from the closed ward of a mental hospital, literally. Somehow, while walking by the gate with guards there to stop me, a truck blocked the guards view of me and I was free.
I caught a ride that left me just a three minute walk from where I lived alone, in a little room my daughter Ruth had rented for me. I believed in my destiny without a single moment of doubt, never saying anyone should believe me just for my saying so, mind you, just wanting to share my story, so truly full of outrageous synchronicity, I thought anyone should want to hear what was for me absolute proof, there is this Hebrew God, personal, orchestrating the events of my life that I interpret the way I do. I honestly never wanted anyone to believe that I am the Messiah, just that there is This God, the One in The Hebrew Bible and He Creates all of us and all we ever come to know.
Like any person I have ever known, God doesn't like to be defined and constrained with labels. Or libeled by people saying what He Can or Cannot do, His own desire being to do as He Wills, according to His Nature, which He says can only be described with the words "I Will Be What I Will Be." This is the attitude of many people of creative nature that I have met, over the years.
Moses calls Him Merciful and Forgiving and other such platitudes, I am sure not out of propitiation or extortion or flattery, but based on his own experiences, which no one else shared or could understand. God seems to have been quite relentless in retribution against The Children of Israel, every time they complained or strayed in their Faith.
Now one might think, as I have sometimes, that after all my many wondrous experiences of being saved from situations which were detrimental to my finances, reputation, mental health, safe housing, nutritional needs and whatever else one might need for peace of mind, I would have developed a belief that God will never do me any harm or confound my Faith.
I can't say that. I don't know the future.
King Saul came to believe in himself and he ended up as badly as any King possibly can. David in his very old age, shivered so badly from relentlessly feeling cold, they brought him a young maiden to warm his body, a service he never availed himself of. She served him food and covered him and cleaned his aged decrepit body but he never touched her intimately. He doesn't appear to have been a happy man in his old age.
Many of the anointed Kings of Israel, all Messiahs by definition, came to an early and miserable demise.
On the other hand, my knowledge of God is no longer in any sense, a frozen idea. It is a living relationship of two way communication, which never ceases to astound me. I have never felt so completely loved, and cared for, in my life.
Yet, it is not unreasonable to fear the loss of what one so intensely loves. And at the same, to be ecstatically happy that one is so fortunate to be loved so intimately by ONE who knows me so much better than I know myself.
This brings me to where I am now.
I am being threatened that if I don't come to a meeting with the manager of the company that rents me my room in this flat, who manages the services I have received these last four and a half years , such as two weekly talks with a counselor and a weekly talk with a social worker, I will be evicted from the services and the flat.
He refused to explain to me why it is to my benefit to come to the first such meeting, which is an hour and a half bus ride in each direction. I didn't come, as I had told him previously I wouldn't, and instead sent him an email explaining myself, that he ignored. I told him I never go anywhere to meet anyone without having some faith such a meeting will help me some way, and I have no need I know of he can help me with. All he would say is that is has something to do with the way I manage my affairs here, without agreeing to explain what exactly is wrong with how I behave.
I know what's on his mind.
I was late in paying some bills for the first time since I began living here. I told my flat mates I would pay the bills and any fines or interest in three weeks, when I get my social security. They complained that I had presented this late payment as a fact and not asked their agreement. Both the women I share the flat with have expressed an inexplicable and irrational hatred for me.
This despite my constantly expressed willingness to resolve all issues, such as if I didn't clean after myself to either of their satisfaction, all they have to do is mention what I left and I will promptly fix whatever they find faulty, without excuses or explanations. This has never improved their relentless insistence that I don't respect them and their efforts to keep the place clean. I had a few months of grace with one of them, and we had great conversations about philosophy and politics and literature, with her finally inviting me to a very good meal in a restaurant. She also gave me on three of four occasions small amounts of unsolicited cash, which I accepted, thanking her profusely. Then I got very involved with all going on inside of me and withdrew into myself. Her hostility returned, irrationally and unreasonably.
She has told the social worker and the counselor that she is afraid of me but admits other than once when I answered her in a tone of voice she didn't like, she has nothing concrete to justify her fears. I am not the only one she has hated irrationally. As it turns out, she has been saying she is afraid of me and hates me for a while now in her conversations with the counselor and the social worker. I have since paid the bills sooner than I thought I could.
Despite this, I was sent a very formal threatening letter with a copy to all involved. It says that if I don't come to the next meeting and accept his viewpoint that I am wrong in how I behave, and then change my ways according to his instructions, he will have me removed from the apartment, all the while knowing I have no where to go. It would mean back to the streets, this time without Itay to bring me whatever my heart desires. I have the idea this has become a control issue for him, a matter of hurt pride. He wants to be the hero for a woman with irrational fears and hatred and so demonstrate his manhood against my insistence I need nothing of his help and have done nothing to warrant an arbitrary call to be disciplined severely for what has been going on now, for the duration of my time here. I wrote him another email which he has ignored, telling him he has made me laugh out loud. Which is very true. I chuckled for hours.
He also sent a copy of his letter to the psychiatrist who is fully aware I haven't taken the poison proscribed by her since late October last year, and am very well of for having stopped. She accepted this despite her telling me I would end up again in the closed ward. She did so, as my psychologist, who gave me sessions for a very small token fee, told her she was confident I was no threat whatsoever to society and my social worker said there is nothing in what I share with her that she believes is pathological. Imagine that!
Nevertheless, the psychiatrist told me once that it is her job to make sure Artists like me don't lose control and hurt someone, with no real regard to whether I really need the "medication" or not, as I am diagnosed with an incurable mental affliction called schizophrenia that warrants taking a debilitating chemical, know to cause Parkinson like symptoms, diabetes, loss of any sex drive, significant gains of weight and other sundry side effects of which I am well aware. After all, I took the shit for seven years and stopped cold turkey on God's instructions and a miracle when a pill disappeared into thin air. Of course she will say I have to start taking the medication again as I am causing trouble as she predicted. If I refuse, the manager has a more plausible excuse to have me evicted. I am not going to go to the meting with the psychiatrist now, either.
Things now will unfold as they will. I hold in my mind two numbers that have been a sign for me these past 17 years and more. The numbers of my address when the adventure first began.
47=Trust God
164= Believe in God.
1647 is what The Hebrew Bible says of Noah, "he was an honest wholesome man in his generation."
So am I.
_________________
September 29th, 2017
A Catastrophic Tragedy. Maybe Not!
29283812363938/11=2662164760358
Jonathan Michael Robbins
= 939=
יונתן מיכאל רבינס
Now how can this be so?
I for one fear nothing I can see with my eyes, except perhaps great heights. Even so I jumped from an airplane more than twenty times without ever having to be pushed, unlike some others I had considered braver than me.
And when I close my eyes, nothing I see frightens me. So why should I be happy to be afraid, no less than all the time? Afraid of what?
The fact is, I am afraid all the time and happy it is so.
I am truly afraid of nothing but an invisible and formless idea in my mind, the contemplation of which can make me literally tremble and shake with vibrations that emanate from the void, in which this idea resides.
The idea is my ever oscillating and reverberating concept of Allah.
Allah who says of Himself to Moses, in response to Moses requesting His Name, this so as to identify for The Children of Israel, The Name of The God who was sending them their awaited Messiah, Moses, and so Allah calls Himself, "I Will Be What I Will Be!"
Future tense.
Anything I think of God is founded on experiences I have already have. Things I have seen for myself or heard of from what is recorded as history, what we call the "past". I have in my own past, read books written by other people who had their own experiences which caused them to contemplate God in their own way, which never satisfied me. Probably because their ideas were all founded on experiences they didn't share, rather they wrote only of their contemplation and the evolving concepts, which must have been abstracted from experiences I knew nothing of.
I did understand that the essence of any valuable wisdom must be founded on experience. It is experience that refines intelligence into wisdom.
Now I was born into a generation, this time, which celebrates the idea that God has died or that there is no God.
Many ideas of God that Jews had, went up in smoke out of the chimneys of death camps like Auschwitz. Hypocritical and Idolatrous Christianity had given God and His Son and The Holy Ghost, somehow one and the same, a very bad name. In the west, Islam was seen as a primitive religion. The Hebrew Bible's God had gotten misunderstood by the Jews, who carried His Contract with them and studied it, even when doing so might mean being burnt at the stake. They took The Hebrew Bible and their Talmud, the so called Oral Laws based on The Bible, wherever they were forced to live, reading from it all the time. They founded their whole religion from the book that condemned them to death if they didn't hear His Voice and hearken to what he says, and they had been being murdered and tortured and segregated into impoverished Ghettos by Christians, for many centuries.
Obviously they didn't hear His Voice or refused to do what He told them to, if He Existed at all, as they professed to believe. They certainly demonstrated on many occasions, death defying steadfast loyalty.
But it seemed to be of no avail.
They weren't redeemed, their Messiah didn't come, for nearly two thousand years, until finally in an age of enlightenment, many newly secular and educated Jews saw no God in the new light of the scientific method, and took matters into their own hands to save themselves from further persecution and Pogroms.
Modern secular Zionism was born. Most religious Jews who insisted redemption would come only as The awaited Son of David, prayed for The Messiah and stayed where they were, only to have their ideas of God go up in smoke with the ashes of their incinerated bodies, twirling around in the air with the ashes of their wives and baby children. Religious Jews in Arab countries in the middle east, were expelled from their homes without their property and means of livelihood and came to Israel impoverished and without the western education needed to get a decent job in Israel after the Holocaust.
Simply put, God had Gotten Himself a very bad reputation for many Jews and many people in the western world. In China He completely ceased to exist and communists all over the word declared that Religion and hence the concept of God, was nothing but an opium pipe dream.
The State of Israel was founded mostly by secular Jews, many of whom were communists or socialist atheists. Despite all this, my own experiences when I began to think about God for myself, were from watching my father the Rabbi return to his Faith and vocation after having mostly abandoned a religious way of life in my childhood. He seemed to be incredibly Blessed and serendipity was evident in his favor, in the most outrageous ways. His Hebrew Named was Baruch, which means simply "Blessed!"
It is from the coalescence of all these impressions that began to emerge an idea of what "I Will Be What I Will Be" means.
It obviously doesn't mean one who seeks a good reputation. It obviously doesn't mean, one to to be confined by expectations of How he should behave. It obviously doesn't mean a Creator with any kind of predictable character in what He causes to become reality for His Living Creations.
The Hebrew Bible describes God as merciful to those who worship in truth. Were all those ultra orthodox Jews who sang of the coming of the Messiah as they waited in line for a shower of deadly gas, lying when they prayed? I now believe he was merciful to them.
From within, as he has so often been merciful to me, despite anything anyone else would think of some of my experiences, when seen from the outside. God's mercy manifests for me not so much in the absence of adversity, to the contrary, that is when it is most evident and expedient but only in a way no one else can see, unless they see the twinkle in my eyes as I am being tied to a bed in an insane asylum for no real reason other than I insulted a male nurse by telling him he had no respect for my nakedness, as he burst into the showers and I felt I deserved more respect.
I did spray him for just a second with water. Nothing else. I was fed and then tied to a bed in a room alone, given a shot in the ass and then fell into a deep sleep while hallucinating I had been forgotten in another dimension and would never be found, this the final fate of my career as The Messiah. I didn't deny for a moment that I am The Messiah. I simply decided not to say or do anything ever again to promote the idea. My resolve disappeared the moment I heard a voice in me whisper, "Jonathan, now is the time to leave!" and I did run away from the closed ward of a mental hospital, literally. Somehow, while walking by the gate with guards there to stop me, a truck blocked the guards view of me and I was free.
I caught a ride that left me just a three minute walk from where I lived alone, in a little room my daughter Ruth had rented for me. I believed in my destiny without a single moment of doubt, never saying anyone should believe me just for my saying so, mind you, just wanting to share my story, so truly full of outrageous synchronicity, I thought anyone should want to hear what was for me absolute proof, there is this Hebrew God, personal, orchestrating the events of my life that I interpret the way I do. I honestly never wanted anyone to believe that I am the Messiah, just that there is This God, the One in The Hebrew Bible and He Creates all of us and all we ever come to know.
Like any person I have ever known, God doesn't like to be defined and constrained with labels. Or libeled by people saying what He Can or Cannot do, His own desire being to do as He Wills, according to His Nature, which He says can only be described with the words "I Will Be What I Will Be." This is the attitude of many people of creative nature that I have met, over the years.
Moses calls Him Merciful and Forgiving and other such platitudes, I am sure not out of propitiation or extortion or flattery, but based on his own experiences, which no one else shared or could understand. God seems to have been quite relentless in retribution against The Children of Israel, every time they complained or strayed in their Faith.
Now one might think, as I have sometimes, that after all my many wondrous experiences of being saved from situations which were detrimental to my finances, reputation, mental health, safe housing, nutritional needs and whatever else one might need for peace of mind, I would have developed a belief that God will never do me any harm or confound my Faith.
I can't say that. I don't know the future.
King Saul came to believe in himself and he ended up as badly as any King possibly can. David in his very old age, shivered so badly from relentlessly feeling cold, they brought him a young maiden to warm his body, a service he never availed himself of. She served him food and covered him and cleaned his aged decrepit body but he never touched her intimately. He doesn't appear to have been a happy man in his old age.
Many of the anointed Kings of Israel, all Messiahs by definition, came to an early and miserable demise.
On the other hand, my knowledge of God is no longer in any sense, a frozen idea. It is a living relationship of two way communication, which never ceases to astound me. I have never felt so completely loved, and cared for, in my life.
Yet, it is not unreasonable to fear the loss of what one so intensely loves. And at the same, to be ecstatically happy that one is so fortunate to be loved so intimately by ONE who knows me so much better than I know myself.
This brings me to where I am now.
I am being threatened that if I don't come to a meeting with the manager of the company that rents me my room in this flat, who manages the services I have received these last four and a half years , such as two weekly talks with a counselor and a weekly talk with a social worker, I will be evicted from the services and the flat.
He refused to explain to me why it is to my benefit to come to the first such meeting, which is an hour and a half bus ride in each direction. I didn't come, as I had told him previously I wouldn't, and instead sent him an email explaining myself, that he ignored. I told him I never go anywhere to meet anyone without having some faith such a meeting will help me some way, and I have no need I know of he can help me with. All he would say is that is has something to do with the way I manage my affairs here, without agreeing to explain what exactly is wrong with how I behave.
I know what's on his mind.
I was late in paying some bills for the first time since I began living here. I told my flat mates I would pay the bills and any fines or interest in three weeks, when I get my social security. They complained that I had presented this late payment as a fact and not asked their agreement. Both the women I share the flat with have expressed an inexplicable and irrational hatred for me.
This despite my constantly expressed willingness to resolve all issues, such as if I didn't clean after myself to either of their satisfaction, all they have to do is mention what I left and I will promptly fix whatever they find faulty, without excuses or explanations. This has never improved their relentless insistence that I don't respect them and their efforts to keep the place clean. I had a few months of grace with one of them, and we had great conversations about philosophy and politics and literature, with her finally inviting me to a very good meal in a restaurant. She also gave me on three of four occasions small amounts of unsolicited cash, which I accepted, thanking her profusely. Then I got very involved with all going on inside of me and withdrew into myself. Her hostility returned, irrationally and unreasonably.
She has told the social worker and the counselor that she is afraid of me but admits other than once when I answered her in a tone of voice she didn't like, she has nothing concrete to justify her fears. I am not the only one she has hated irrationally. As it turns out, she has been saying she is afraid of me and hates me for a while now in her conversations with the counselor and the social worker. I have since paid the bills sooner than I thought I could.
Despite this, I was sent a very formal threatening letter with a copy to all involved. It says that if I don't come to the next meeting and accept his viewpoint that I am wrong in how I behave, and then change my ways according to his instructions, he will have me removed from the apartment, all the while knowing I have no where to go. It would mean back to the streets, this time without Itay to bring me whatever my heart desires. I have the idea this has become a control issue for him, a matter of hurt pride. He wants to be the hero for a woman with irrational fears and hatred and so demonstrate his manhood against my insistence I need nothing of his help and have done nothing to warrant an arbitrary call to be disciplined severely for what has been going on now, for the duration of my time here. I wrote him another email which he has ignored, telling him he has made me laugh out loud. Which is very true. I chuckled for hours.
He also sent a copy of his letter to the psychiatrist who is fully aware I haven't taken the poison proscribed by her since late October last year, and am very well of for having stopped. She accepted this despite her telling me I would end up again in the closed ward. She did so, as my psychologist, who gave me sessions for a very small token fee, told her she was confident I was no threat whatsoever to society and my social worker said there is nothing in what I share with her that she believes is pathological. Imagine that!
Nevertheless, the psychiatrist told me once that it is her job to make sure Artists like me don't lose control and hurt someone, with no real regard to whether I really need the "medication" or not, as I am diagnosed with an incurable mental affliction called schizophrenia that warrants taking a debilitating chemical, know to cause Parkinson like symptoms, diabetes, loss of any sex drive, significant gains of weight and other sundry side effects of which I am well aware. After all, I took the shit for seven years and stopped cold turkey on God's instructions and a miracle when a pill disappeared into thin air. Of course she will say I have to start taking the medication again as I am causing trouble as she predicted. If I refuse, the manager has a more plausible excuse to have me evicted. I am not going to go to the meting with the psychiatrist now, either.
Things now will unfold as they will. I hold in my mind two numbers that have been a sign for me these past 17 years and more. The numbers of my address when the adventure first began.
47=Trust God
164= Believe in God.
1647 is what The Hebrew Bible says of Noah, "he was an honest wholesome man in his generation."
So am I.
Very soon signs and wonders will be everywhere, starting with the one which will resolve my situation, here in the flat.
_________________
September 29th, 2017
A Catastrophic Tragedy. Maybe Not!
29283812363938/11=2662164760358
Jonathan Michael Robbins
= 939=
יונתן מיכאל רבינס
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