What To Worship

This, I submit
Is the freedom
Of real education
Of learning how to be
Well-adjusted
You get to consciously decide

[Chorus]
What has meaning
And what doesn’t
What has meaning
And what doesn’t
What has meaning
What has meaning
What has meaning
What has meaning
W-W-What has meaning
What has meaning
What has meaning
What has meaning

You get to decide
What to worship
Because here’s something else
That’s weird
But true
In the day-to-day trenches of adult life
There is actually no such thing
As atheism
There is no such thing
As not worshipping
Everybody worships
The only choice we get
Is what to worship
And a compelling reason
For maybe
Choosing some sort of god
Or spiritual-type thing to worship
Be it JC or Allah
Be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess
Or the Four Noble Truths
Or some inviolable set of ethical principles
Is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive

If you worship money and things
If they are where you tap
Real meaning
In life
Then you will never have enough
Never feel
You have enough
It’s the truth

Worship your own body
And beauty
And sexual allure
And you will always feel ugly
And when time and age start showing
You will die a million deaths
Before they finally grieve you
On one level, we all know this stuff already
It’s been codified as myths
Proverbs
Clichés
Epigrams
Parables
The skeleton of every great story

[Chorus]
What has meaning
And what doesn’t
What has meaning
And what doesn’t
What has meaning
What has meaning
What has meaning
What has meaning
W-W-What has meaning
What has meaning
What has meaning
What has meaning

The whole trick is keeping the truth
Up front
In daily consciousness
Worship power
You will end up feeling weak
And afraid
And you will need ever more power over others
To numb you
To your own fear
Worship your intellect
Being seen as smart
You will end up feeling stupid
A fraud
Always on the verge of being found out
But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful
It’s that they’re
Unconscious
They are default settings
They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into
Day after day
Getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing

And the so-called real world
Will not discourage you from operating on your default settings
Because the so-called real world
Of men
And money
And power
Hums merrily along on the fuel of fear
And anger and frustration and craving and worship of self
Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that Have yielded extraordinary wealth
And comfort and personal freedom
The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms
Alone at the center of all creation

This kind of freedom
Has much to recommend it
But of course there are all different kinds of freedom
And the kind that is most precious
You will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of Wanting and achieving and displaying
The really important kind of freedom involves
Attention and awareness and discipline
And being able truly to care about other people
And to sacrifice for them
Over and over
In a myriad heavy unsexy ways every day

That is real freedom
That is being educated
And understanding
How to think
The alternative is unconsciousness
The default setting
The rat race
The constant gnawing sense
Of having had
And lost
Some infinite thing

I know that this stuff probably doesn’t sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed To sound
What it is, as far as I can see
Is the capital-T Truth
With a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away
You are, of course
Free to think of it whatever you wish
But please don’t just dismiss it as some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon
None of this stuff is really about morality
Or religion
Or dogma
Or big fancy questions
Of life after death
The capital-T Truth
Is about life
BEFORE death
It is about the real value of a real education
Which has almost nothing to do with knowledge
And everything to do
With simple
Awareness
Awareness of what is so real and essential
So hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time
That we have to keep reminding ourselves
Over and over
This is water

This is water
This is water
This is water
This is water
This is water
This is water

It is unimaginably hard to do this
To stay conscious and alive in the adult world
Day in and day out
Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true
Your education really IS
The job of a lifetime
And it commences
Now

[Chorus]
What has meaning
And what doesn’t
What has meaning
And what doesn’t
(You get to consciously decide)
What has meaning
What has meaning
What has meaning
What has meaning
W-W-What has meaning
What has meaning
What has meaning
What has meaning

I wish you way more than luck
I wish you way more than luck
I wish you way more than luck
I wish you way more than luck