I am a survivor of the largest cult in the world - Organized Christian Religion - and as such, I am rather acutely aware of the betrayal we all are feeling inside. In our industrial world, we have industrialized everything, including spirit-centered dogmas which have now SO long lost their capacity to act as a container for our inner "otherness" that we find ourselves awash in real depravity.
As human beings we have become rather abruptly aware of our dualistic nature via the container we call consciousness. The capacity for Knowledge (forbidden fruit and smoked gouda on sliced Truth, anyone?) has been bestowed upon this creature known as Man through the eternal nature of opposites. We understand everything through opposition - we know what a thing is by what it is not. The entire process of language learning for a child is a reductive process, beginning with The Everything from which we are all born, and with which infants are still quite intimately familiar, down through layers and layers of words and new understandings of what is and is not, what a thing is because it is not another thing.
Likewise our personalities are whittled away from their 360 degrees of wholeness, (Bly) down to whatever shred of Truth (if any) remains in their outward confessional known as ego. It's not wrong, it just is. But the reclamation of those Truths can become a necessarily pragmatic approach to preventing the aforementioned depravity, to which I will soon be getting.
We are bobbing about in an ever increasing ocean of collective consciousness, and the pool is getting crowded. We are finding it impossible these days to disavow knowledge of certain horrors that enable some of us to have luxuries like clean water, functioning cities, financial infrastructures, roads, medicine for HIV, Nike's, and on, and on.
But god damnit people, what is anyone supposed to do? Give up the fight to have more goodies? Even in such dour economic times as this, one still yearns for every damn thing. We may not be able to find a way to buy it - not even with a credit card this year, bitches! - but yeah, sure, I still have all the dreams of material gain and wealth like anybody else in their early 30's. On the other hand, I know that this isn't what will ultimately make me happy. I want something a whole hell of a lot bigger and cooler than my own fucking ego-stroking mansion and what-nots to go with it. Way, way bigger than that.
But! It is still 2008, Barack Obama is still not yet the POTUS (smooth-transition-assurances from Mr. Bush notwithstanding) and the dying gasps of this capitalist machine have not quite yet been sputtered. But let me just tell you something, Sam's Club, nobody is fooled by the strains of "The First Noel" coming from a plastic tree on November 3rd. It's still autumn, I still have a few more hay rides to go before the end of the season, I have not yet enjoyed my final cup of mulled cider. So I will be DAMNED if I'm going to believe it's the Christmas season damn near a fuck month before Thanksgiving.
I have planned to enjoy the luxury of allowing a (locally raised, cage-free, organic) turkey (costing a heart-stopping 3.49 a god damn pound) to be slaughtered in my name. I am going to pick her up next day, and immediately immerse her in a mixture of sea salt, pure organic vermont maple syrup, and water for 24 hours until Thursday morning when I'm going to roast her using the foil wrap method. This combination of factors will result in the most tender, flavorful, and not just juicy, but WET meat one could ever hope for. Please, damnit. Please. Let me have some peace before ramming it down my throat. Hell, you're only adding to the consumer paranoia that keeps us pinching those pennies.
You see, none of this stuff we do every year to ensure good profits for end of fiscals is in any way actually Christian. Christ would call most of our religious and political leaders Pharisees. The total lack of spirit-centered activity has us ALL suffering and questioning.
No longer do we have real authority figures in most parts of our individual lives. We are also tremendously ill-equipped - as a whole - for really good cognitive processing. We haven't been taught to think for ourselves, nor to rely on each other for our collective strengths. There is, really, nowhere to turn. We know the greed machine doesn't really make us happy. So what will?
Well, I believe we need what Jung referred to as a unifying myth. (Or was it Edinger?) But less mythical and more grounded in reality. I think that we do have an awareness of the collective creative and productive ability of the human force on this planet. I think we are becoming more and more aware of it every day. I think that ultimately, in our deepest heart of hearts, where I believe we are all connected, where we all spring from the same Life Force Energy that allows anything and everything to exist, we want to do well for ourselves and each other, as a whole.
I don't believe we want to hurt others in order to have more for ourselves. I don't believe that myth is true. I believe that we want a future for ourselves, our children, our grandchildren, and the generations of our seed that we shall never personally know or meet, that is built around the abundant and life-giving nature of our very real, natural universe.
Collectively, we have the power to create some massively beautiful solutions to very modern problems. Our mass and scale has grown to such epic proportions in such a short period of time that we have begun to lose the ability to sustain our individually epic lives. Somewhere, in places we don't talk about at parties, we are aware that not every human being on the planet can have a Ferrari, for instance, but that makes us want no less for one of our own. It seems natural and perfectly acceptable to think that some will have more, while others will have less. In order to shore up that narrative against the waves of reality surrounding us in the faces of, say, the homeless, we have endeavored to create a narrative about social security, and the welfare of our people. But even that narrative is also no longer able to withstand the ever-increasing eyes of awareness that continue to open, faster and faster, in that ocean of consciousness.
We also believe, in some rather mostly unmentioned places, that what we do to one, we do to each of us. We believe that we should do unto others. (We believe that everyone should have a Ferrari, however infeasible this ostensibly is.) But we don't mention these beliefs very often, because in order for everyone to truly benefit, we have to be willing to give up (at least some degree of) individual power, fame, and wealth, whether real or imagined.
A real assessment of global resources and ecosystems makes it clear that we are headed for that cliff, but what the fuck are we to do, right? I believe Barack will offer some guidance in that, as he should. I also believe that ultimately, our economic and financial systems are more of a joke than anything else, and eventually, we are going to see that The Human Race will rise to the challenge of becoming a unified race, unifying our goals and visions for a sustainable and profitable future.
We are all people, my friend Orka Veer said to me the other day. Indeed we are. And we don't truly want this kind of horror in the world to continue, do we? We don't want the kind of human rights violations and social injustices that occur daily in China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, and other countries to go on, just so that we can buy more cheap gadgets and toys just for ourselves, do we? I don't.
I would rather - I would MUCH rather - that we were working together on a global solution to our housing, energy, and food production needs for 20 billion people (not that far away - one generation?) that can be effectuated in such a way as to ensure the ecological sustenance we would all really, really be grateful for. Let's face it - the apocolypse is only going to come in so far as we bring it on ourselves. There's no imaginary friend up in the sky gonna turn loco on our asses and wipe us out, locusts and moons turning to blood and shit. It's just not going to happen.
But we may destroy ourselves by insisting that every one can have every thing, so our individual greed is acceptable. We only cling to that greed because it gives us an answer to the otherwise meaningless existence we are collectively leading right now. We will benefit when our meaning in life comes from the unified effort to secure the survival of our planet, all species, and all life.
That, I daresay, would be the actual embodiment of the tenets of the Right to Life movement. Not more traditionally Republican shenanigans.
Anyway. I've got lots more where this came from, so maybe I'll piss somebody new off tomorrow!
