Transcending the Cultural Entanglements of Death

One lesson regarding life has repeatedly impressed itself upon me lately: the chains of entanglements society deliberately imposes upon us from birth and increasingly ensnares us in throughout our lives are systemic manifestations of "ego" and "death."  These snares of ego-dominated society rob us of our life energy and freedom to live in peace, joy, and harmony.

From birth we are told who we are and what we are supposed to be and do as a person.  We are given a name we did not choose for ourself before we were even born; a government we literally were incapable of consenting to being ruled by prints out a fancy piece of paper and generates a random number locking in and imposing that false ego-identity for the rest of our life; we go through childhood being bombarded by other people's ideas about what we should believe and how we should behave, robbing us of our own identity; public education gives us a sanitized, spoon-fed notion of what the world is like, suffocates our creativity and imagination, denies us the knowledge of how to think critically, and robs us of our conscience; as we go about our lives, our mistakes follow and haunt us because society tracks and labels everything you do, judges you for it, and never allows you to live beyond it once you learn from it and make amends (our mistakes are supposed to guide us, not imprison us); and, as adults, the need for money enslaves us into committing our invaluably precious time to corporate machinations that are destroying the planet and our fellow human beings, robbing us of our life-force and destabilizing our families and communities in the process.

Life and death are a dancing pair of dualities; they do indeed need one another.  Yet, what we see in the delusional abstract layer of conceptualization humanity has imposed on its self is grossly out of balance with the ground layer of physical reality, dangerously favoring egotistical falsehoods and insatiable desires to a degree that threatens the totality of Life on this planet, and continues to cause immense and unnecessary suffering upon billions of souls.  Our collective ego has become completely out of control, behaving like a mental parasite on a global scale.  Whenever a duality is so out of balance, it is inevitably subject to a self-instigated correction that restores balance – this is karma (cause-and-effect within a dynamic system).  In this case, a karmic correction will mean a mass-extinction of the human race.

(Transhumanism and the "technology singularity," which will inevitably lead to humanity becoming a Borg-like hive mind in which individuality is destroyed, are an unattainable mirage due to the systemic failures and societal decay exponentially increasing in parallel with technological advancement.  We do not have the maturity and wisdom as a species to reach this evolutionary threshold without destroying ourselves one way or the other.  Besides do we really want to lose our individuality and the creative power of diversity in the process of collective integration?)

The extreme manifestations of our collective ego, such as global capitalism (built upon a sociopathic ponzi banking scheme writ large), xenophobic nationalism, and ego-driven populist individualism are a "clear and present danger" to the People of the world, and the life-support systems of Earth which we all depend upon to sustain us.  As I have increasingly urged myself, and urge all of you here and now to consider, we must have the courage and determination to dissolve the societally imposed entanglements that currently siphon our individual life-force into systems that are destroying humanity and the Earth.  We must withdraw our consent to be subjects of corrupt socioeconomic systems.  We must let go of all entanglements that no longer serve our best interests.  We must relinquish our attachments to ideas that misguide as from seeing the "truth of what is."  We must redirect our life-force, or precious time, to constructing a new and novel socioeconomic paradigm that is life-affirming and sustainable.

The infinite growth paradigm of our global culture has crashed into the finite limits of our world.  No matter how hard we try, we will only serve to compound the problem (and accelerate our own destruction) if we continue to rely on and feed into the old socioeconomic order.  It cannot be saved; it must be allowed to die conscientiously and in deliberate fashion, or we will all die with it.  Only by collectively walking in balance and wisdom, built on a solid ground of life-sustaining values and systems, can we safely proceed in our technological advancements and noble ego-drive to explore and understand the universe, without destroying ourselves in the process.

On the Existential Threat of Selective Censorship

(A loving reminder and warning I offer out of heartfelt concern and genuine compassion for you all.)

The society we have known thus far is unraveling and failing for many reasons, but let me try to briefly identify one particularly fundamental cause based on the behavior I have noticed people actively engaging in lately: namely, disconnecting from others who challenge us to grow and learn and be invested in one another. People have generally forgotten or were denied the gift of knowing how to truly listen to each other with genuine presence and emotional investment. Many have forgotten how to respect others by giving them their full, open-minded attention and appreciation, denying the dignity and invalidating the existence of the other person. We do this quite commonly while failing to recognize that such treatment is a major source of our own suffering, loneliness, and despair when the tables are turned.

When there is a society-wide culture that promotes a disrespect for and avoidance of different points of view, that society is inevitably doomed, because society is a system and all healthy systems require healthy feedback loops. We all need to be heard and have our concerns acknowledged and our fears validated, or we start to go a little crazy inside because suffering must be transformed for it to not consume and corrupt us. Although transforming our suffering requires personal courage and personal effort, we all need our pain to be acknowledged and validated along the way, and we need others to help guide us through the difficulty. Through truly listening to one another, we can see that all misbehavior stems from ignorance or a place of deep suffering. When we recognize this, we lose our instinct to be fearful and mistrustful of others by default.

The potential destruction of civilized society will, ultimately, be a result of this behavior of willful avoidance generating a huge buildup of anger, resentment, fear, and despair in us all. Why deny others the kind of attention and appreciation you want others to pay you, and that you need in order to be sane and happy? Being truly emotionally invested and involved in the wellbeing of others, as well as in their hopes and doubts, dreams and nightmares, staves off disaster for us all.

– With Love, Respect, & Gratitude for You All

Inter-Dependence Day

What does “independence” mean in 2016 America?  What does it mean to sing, “for the land of the free, and the home of the brave,” from within a modern surveillance police-state and ‘teenage wasteland’?  Ever satisfied with half-measures and half-truths, gimmicks and hot air, we collectively handed over our futures to narcissists in every area of socioeconomic life and category of human endeavour.  Even in many academic circles, it has been long forgotten that it is a logical fallacy to weight the validity of information based on the credentials of its source.  Successive American generations sold their souls and their childrens’ futures for short-lived and hollow gains.  We abdicated our personal responsibility and freedom, for the illusion of greater security and convenience of “authorities” and “experts” controlling every aspect of our lives for us, including how to think.  But most of all, we have failed to raise our children with love, compassion, understanding, and encouragement, and through our own example to become strong-willed, free-thinking, responsible, self-sacrificing, and honorable people.  If you believe at all in the idea that, “it takes a whole village to raise a child,” then it’s not hard to comprehend why our “civilized” society has disintegrated from within.

 

Over the course of the 20th century especially (in correlation with the rise of consumerism, federalism, and corporatism), successive generations of parents have increasingly abandoned their children’s futures out of their own selfishness and willful ignorance.  (Note also: neglect works just as well as abuse.)  The evidence literally stares us in the face, in the form of all the countless eyes of children staring back at us — the tens of millions of children trapped in “adult” bodies — their minds never having been nurtured and guided into genuine pscyhological maturity.  Rather, in truth, all these young and middle-aged “adults” going about their American lives are deeply wounded, neglected, and abandoned adolescents who merely cover their frail psyches behind the masks they create for themselves and each other.  They are ultimately fear-rooted (-driven) personalities because their growth was stunted or blunted by the negligence and neglect of others.  Fear was the language in which they were raised, and rejection.  Their natural, innate innocence and loving natures were routinely ignored, or even attacked, by the many adults they looked up to.  What surprise can it honestly be for people to see that hostility, bigotry, and greed are an exponentiating result?

 

What the hell happened, you often ask yourself…  Deep down, you already know why: we are all deeply interconnected with one another but have been acting like we are not.  Look in the mirror, my fellow Americans — yes, all of us are to blame.  "You reap what you sow" is somehow an unclear concept to many people still, even as they stand in their very own pile of shit, day in and day out.  People have become increasingly lazy, distracted, arrogant, spoiled hypocrites.  People have increasingly turned a blind eye to problems festering in their own homes and communities.  People have become overwhelmingly disinclined to put in the degree of effort required to reap the rewards they rationalize themselves to be worthy of anyway.  People have allowed parasitic ideas and corrupt thinking patterns to take root in and unravel our families and communities from within, by virtue of the costly indulgences of apathy and arrogant presumption.  People have chosen to be lemmings, guided by the hands of egomaniacs.  People have shirked their moral duty to their communities, as citizens receiving communal benefits, by failing to think for themselves and stand up for what they know in their hearts to be right and noble.

 

People want greater democracy, but are satisfied with handing over the country to an aristocratic oligarchy of narcissists.  People want sanity restored, but are satisfied with being handed a binary choice of a criminal elitest and a fascist bigot to choose for the presidency.  People rail against how corrupt the system is, but are satisfied with staking their childrens’ futures on nothing but the delusional optimism that the system will somehow “right itself” without actual effort on their part.  The American Dream will never be more than a fantasy until we wake up from our drunken slumber to see reality as it truly is.  The first step to addressing a problem is to recognize the true, root nature of the problem.  Guess what, the real problem is how most people have been made to perceive the problem.

 

You have likely been misled into thinking the fundamental problem with this country has something to do with groups of “other” people or which political party is in power, when it is you who are responsible for creating the world you wish to inhabit.  Nothing will be fixed so long as the majority of people believe “someone else will fix it.”  See this attitude for what it is: cowardice.  Also, consider taking the log out of your own eye before helping another with the speck in theirs.  The moment we finally choose to take personal ownership for how we live our own lives and each treat one another, we will truly deserve to celebrate Independence Day.  We must be brave enough to be free.