revolution begins in the mirror

When the shaky state of our personal lives and the crumbling, corrupt empire beyond our garden gates take drastic turns into the unpredictable unknown - as they have recently - our feelings of impending disaster loom paramount, canceling out our far more authentic urge to turn it off and remove ourselves from the root of our distress.  Indeed, there are unspeakable things taking place all over the globe every hour of every day and night, a worldwide hothouse nurturing extreme variations of Datura stramonium (jimson weed).  And every single day or night we peer into our little doom machines and voluntarily fill our minds (thus our bodies and souls) with further damning confirmation transmitted into our lives from somewhere that is not here, and not where you are either, by some ones we never met and never will, tirelessly working to yank our attentions into his/her ghoulish scenarios, always blinking in come-on neon, costumed as extremely important, vital, need-to know-information that in reality is a litany of violent, tortuous and grotesque behaviors, crimes against humanity - mind you, a humanity of which we are a part and all of it completely impossible to address by our little people selves, miniscule among a handful of other concerned little persons, we find ourselves trying to navigate our way through the journey fully outweighed by a far more powerful, immovable monolith next to which we lack even minus ranged input, we are less than crumbs on the banquet tables of a crazed, alien monarchy and subject to its steam rolling, its all inclusive dominance starring the ever-present feature of its existence, vaporizing all resistance.


We can, however, as humans gifted with insight, compassion and intelligence, work to overstand the situation for what it is and continue as we were with our personal progress before we were so rudely interrupted.  We move on, not at all with a "nothing to see here" attitude designed and implemented to reinforce denial, but with acceptance that great suffering is integral to the life experience. Soon enough, if you don't know it already, you will realize the useless eaters and unwashed masses are not you and me.  I could say something belittling like "they are those uh, others", but the truth is, useless eaters and unwashed masses don't exist, those terms are labels no more realistic than labels on cereal boxes or officialized diagnostic manual categorizations of pharmaceutically profitable disease, i.e.; artificial conditions, syndromes and disorders created expressly for the new world paranoiacs' denial by negative contrast.  Sufferers are human beings, just like ourselves, caught in a maelstrom of events most of which are not of their doing and who have not yet accepted their own fairy tales prevent them from alleviating their misery.  It is also true that suffering can become an identity carrying short-lived benefits for the sufferer on which he or she develops habitual attachment.  When that happens, it is close to impossible for the human being to overstand themselves, much less anything else.

(Related: The Globalization of Addiction ... all these seemingly disparate accounts are united by their focus on the individual addict; but even a cursory historical and cultural survey reveals that the incidence of addiction is essentially a social phenomenon. Many historical and indigenous cultures have lacked even the concept of addiction - but many of these same cultures, once their traditional structures have been disrupted by conquest or colonisation, have been destroyed by it. All across the Americas, the Pacific and Australia, hundreds of 'demoralised' cultures have descended into vicious spirals of addiction, usually to alcohol, in many tragic cases wiping themselves out entirely. The root causes of addiction, then, must run deeper than any individual pathology: they must be sought in a larger story of cultural malaise and 'poverty of the spirit' that forces individuals, often en masse, into desperate and dysfunctional coping strategies. ...)

Emphasis, mine.

It looks as though a failing media in general works overtime in its breathless twenty four-hour news cycle aka theme park rides though the haunted houses of our planet catering to a panic stricken audience gliding round and round islands of despair in little oar-less rowboats, they would do this as panic victims themselves unable to imagine survival in any other, more positive form while eking out an income as Force Multipliers from its primary source of support .  You will recall  the Force Multipliers of the Bush administration as one brief chapter serving their ever-morphing survival requirements.  Indeed, those retired military spokesmen making the rounds of talk shows were the embodiment of the future as heavily funded advertisements for one coercive entity's (is there any other?) point of view and likely not nearly as easily recognizable today as technology marches unimpeded further and deeper into the twilight zone.  This is one area over which we actually have some control.  When we find ourselves feeling bad about the state of the state, we can turn it off.  That's right, put it away and do something else, something that is unrelated to the crude world of manufactured pain and loss.  We do not need to go there.  Try to remember what it was you did when you woke up before you possessed a laptop.  I  have some sweet memories of being outside, having coffee, on a funky porch under shady branches in the spring, or early summer on cool mornings, there were dogs, flowers,  tea cup clouds overhead that inspired ceramics, the occasional passing bicycle, an acoustic guitar to get the sleep out of the fingers, awakening the mind with scales and chord progressions.  We can still do this, IF we want to do it.  There is no law against reading the TAO as the Earth turns towards daylight.  In fact, as record temperatures increase, rearranging your most positive activities to earlier, cooler hours will become necessary.  In the desert, for example, the population  in general begins their day anywhere from midnight to four a.m. It is not unusual to see dog walkers in their pj's or families making a supplies trip into the city well before sunrise.   It is certainly within our ability to adjust to constantly changing circumstances and go with the flow.  We just have to recognize that the outside world is immovable, a wall, Berlin, Palestine, Green Zone, etc., cast in concrete to the core of the Earth reaching beyond the space station and leverage the best of our own positions in the face of it.  We know and we will handle what we know with grace and compassion.


We are well along in this new world now, thrust into it rather suddenly by history's measure, after a hard landing, waking to intense confusion and ludicrous debate on the realities of just what is and is not.   After all is said and done, our peace of mind and ability to draw breath, find joy in every day through freely given, seemingly insignificant acts of kindness, are all we have and all we ever needed, provided we allow the message of The Forces to reach us and trust that message as gospel.  No one will explain it to you.  Everyone is making their way just as you are.  There is no logical reason we cannot make it better for all starting with ourselves, in baby steps.  Think of the totality of life as boot camp, we are in training to maximize genuine altruism, starting with ourselves.  When you can rescue yourself with unswerving determination from the miserable cesspool of fear and loathing, prejudice, denial, panic, anxiety and depression that has a ghastly way of arising literally anytime, anywhere, all the unconscious triggers being scattered widely and disguised as anything but what they actually are, you will eventually note an interesting effect blessedly unfolding around you, I call it "exponential compassion".  Children appear to pick up on it very quickly, followed by adults down the road a bit. Of course, there are far more in your sphere of community who will forever cling to their identity of suffering, but you will see plenty of encouragement for your efforts, regardless that those efforts were initially self-directed.  Of what value are your insights anyway, if not to position yourself so that you are able to rationally survive the cruel nature of our bizarre situation thus, revolutionizing your own relationship with the world at large?


It is my opinion this is how we have to live if we are going to survive our time left on this planet however long or short it may be. Was there ever any other way?  We have many new readers, Hi there, allow me to quote again the words of Henry James in his powerful short story, Benvolio:

... One was often idle when one seemed to be ardently occupied; one was always idle (it might be concluded) when one's occupations had not a high aim. One was idle therefore when one was working simply for one's self. Curiosity for curiosity's sake, art for art's sake, these were essentially broken-winded steeds. Ennui was at the end of everything that did not entangle us somehow with human life. ...

If you do yourself the favor of picking up a Henry James work, which I can not recommend highly enough, you could easily find yourself reading very slowly since Mr. James had the unusual skill of making each sentence a story in itself.