We are whole yet we live divided - Why?
Wholeness. If you are reading this, take a moment and look around. All is connected. The wild is in you. Love is you. Wholeness is you. No matter where you live, you are it. There are no enemies. No divisions, no fear no other. Be still and listen. Thinking will never capture what is. Let your thoughts quiet on their own. Just be. In that deep quiet is when that wholeness that is without name, form or of time is there.. You are not your name. You are not where you came from. You are not what you have been taught nor are you your experiences. There is no past nor future. Only Now. You are not trauma nor sorrow. The essence of you is beyond thought, beyond time and space. You are immeasurable and all that is. You can be it, one just can’t know it. You are Whole. Here is love flowing without trying. Here is where thinking, like breath, is used when needed.
Simple.
I write this treatise because I see that humanity is lost in the underbelly of an unconscious dysfunctional and traumatic conditioning implanted by the hierarchical capitalistic cultural system in which we live and play out our parts. Culture and society is simply an experimental way in which to live. If the experiment begins to illustrate throughout time that it is harming the earth, that it is creating harm in individuals and people collectively, then we need to look at that and change the way we live and experiment until we discover how to live in balance with all of life and sustain our living systems for eons. Yet, many of us who live in our society, don’t see that our culture is inherently unhealthy, violent and is taking us off a cliff of our own destruction. This is a system that is taught to us and we buy into it without realizing that it is an illusion and that we can fundamentally change it.
We have a culture that tries to destroy the individual - the undivided wholeness of who we are (that is actually the root meaning of the word individual) into a separated caricature that will fit into a materialistic hierarchy. Generally speaking, whether through our schooling or from our parents, we have been taught to shut out our wonder and curiosity. We have been taught that our voice doesn’t matter and have been taught to not listen to what arises within oneself, to shut out our wholeness and create an artificial isolated self to perpetuate an isolative power structured society. Education has actually destroyed learning, taken us away from wonder and has continually created and perpetuated the thinking patterns that sprout the artificial divisions of the world. These societal created selves are not separate from this cultural matrix, the roles we play are the matrix. This artificially generated self is the culture and is the collective. We are not separated from these things.
Education has taught us how not to look at the actual problem itself, but to turn away and try and fix it. There is no understanding of what the real issue is as we are taught to escape from feeling and looking at what we perceive to be negative. We are taught to push everything down and escape through a multitude of addictions. The self tries to find some way to fill in the emptiness they have been forced to live with through the addictions of positive thinking, sporting events, gambling, alcohol and drugs, comfort, perfectionism, war, drama, etc. The list goes on and on. Mirroring the self, we are taught collectively not to think about or feel the consequences of our actions. For example, when we tear apart a mountain for coal, we only think about the short term benefits of cheap energy and money. We don't look at the real costs that greatly outnumber the gains. We blind ourselves from seeing the devastating effect it has on the ecosystems, the water and soil impacts, the loss of habitat, the impact on communities below the mining site, and the impact it has on our climate. Because of this lack of ecological thinking (a thinking that derives from wholeness and sees the interconnections of life), we are tearing apart the strands of our living systems, and if this is to continue, we will unwittingly destroy ourselves - for we are innately connected to these living systems.
We teach numbness and perpetuate insensitive seekers who will continuously buy into the materialistic ways of capitalism to try and find some sort of connection or escape to deal with the emptiness inside oneself and collectively. Instead of allowing the child to have space to learn, to have space to explore their curiosity and wonder, we place them in schools with a prescribed curriculum, with prescribed transitions, plug them all into the same trajectory, and then test them and grade them on their knowledge, making them compete or fail for an external reward. This has nothing to do with learning. In fact, it destroys learning and makes children compete against each other and learn that their interests, their voices don’t matter and that authority is what you must follow. Later, we will go deeper into this, and look at what it means to learn, and what it means to truly help a child meet their fullest potential.
Have you ever wondered if it is possible for human beings to live in peace and balance with each other and the earth? With so many people and seemingly so many problems, is it possible for us to change? The answer is yes. Yet, the challenge is that this change means that we all need to begin the arduous journey of self discovery - to actually not run away from problems, but rather to confront them head on and to really look - and to look not with a desire to change it, but to actually see in total clarity. Any desire or belief of how to go about it will distort what one is looking at. Only quietly with full attention can we begin to really see what is going on. If you are willing to look within, and want to wake up, then continue reading. If you are not interested, then this is not for you.
If we were to be completely honest with ourselves and sit for a while with no agenda, with no escape, one may begin to see that what is perceived as “normal” consciousness is a delusion, an imprisonment of our own doing that has created within our cultural construct - hierarchy and division, racism and sexism, poverty and ownership, and the war against the environment. We would see that our brutal conception of society called civilization is generated by our own thinking. We would see that we no longer need to hold onto this ignorance. We would see that what one is, is beyond measurement, beyond time, space, beyond thought and has no beginning nor end.
Yet, for millennia, people have not been able to break free, so stuck in their cultural ideology, an ideology built and consistently taught into children from the deep seated insecurity of the individual and collective. Our hierarchal society propagates the idea of progress to satiate its desire for growth, control, power and domination of the elite upon the rest of us. In this constant desire for growth, this culture’s population has risen exponentially. It seems that the more people there are, the more chaotic things become and the more centralized governments and corporations (presently) battle for control, power coercion at any cost over those that have little or no voice. These arbitrary rules are dictated by those in power and placed down on the populace through propaganda and education. Education creates the cultures' mythological roles that we all play out through the conditioning brought on by schooling, parenting, laws, and the nuances of one’s place within the oppressive hierarchy. Because most teachers have very little idea that they are perpetuating this, over time, the system constricts their own freedom and voice as they end up playing out their own roles in handing over these destructive policies upon children. This power of coercion is in the making of roles and structures that are not only unnatural but also dysfunctional, seem and appear quite normal, natural and real.
In actuality, these laws, hierarchy and division don’t exist except in our conditioned beliefs individually and collectively. We have been taught to see the world in parts. The cartesian split just magnified the direction our society was already heading and implementing. THe world is divided, can be controlled and measured, and resources were there for human consumption. Based on this, we have been going down a path towards our destruction. Nature is us. When we try to control and conquer nature and oneself, we put ourselves in direct conflict with who we are and destroy the very life blood that gives rise to life itself - we are destroying the ecosystems in which we need in order to survive.
If we are at all interested in stopping the violence we perpetuate within oneself and in the world, then we must look at our society at large without ignorance and see our own separtist beliefs and cultural conditioning and let go of the roles we play within the societal framework. Just as importantly, we must change the way we see and interact with our children and let their wonder, voice and wholeness blossom.
We are not who we think we are. We are not Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist Taoist, nor athiest. We are not a communist or socialist, nor Republian or Democrat. We are not an American nor a Russian. There is in actuality nothing to own or steal. Labeling ourselves in any way, destroys our ability to communicate with one another. For example, in wars, leaders try and make sure that soldiers don't interact with the perceived “enemy” for fear of them becoming friends and then not having the motivation anymore to fight.
