- We can all heartily imagine it, and we must, if we wish
to arrive sooner rather than later. At some elusive point in the future,
the human race is alive and well, creatively inhabiting the sunny uplands
of a peaceable and intelligent world. Somehow or other, we manage to climb
up and out from the down-and-dirty, dimwitted and deadly here and now.
On a higher turn of the spiral, we finally become fully human, and humane.
Meanwhile, we are still being driven daft: run routinely and ritually amok,
by miniscule numbers of mutant maddened chimps. Even snorting sides of
beef are now elected to high office on this planet. One may well wonder
just how far the zest for rule by the rudimentary will go: voting for brain
stems? Grubbiest-common-denominator dominators are dragging us ever closer
to the smoking pits of global ruin. How the greediest lowlife human wildlife
gets itself elected to worldly power is nothing new, and getting older
and more dangerous by the day. Primitive negative energies rampantly condition
our species: the biggest mouth, biggest stick, biggest hate and biggest
appetite still lay down the lousy law. Rule by the wise, the obvious way
to avoid mass death by institutionalized stupidity, is not presently even
on the world table.
Is this fatal human habitude of servitude to crafty beast-people really
too entrenched to budge after all these eons? One might gaze into humanity's
soiled and sorrowful history, or at the vast dismal swamps of current turgid
apathy and die of heartbreak then and there. Truly, the collective waking
nightmare of useless and preventable human suffering is overwhelming. The
stubborn subconscious collusion of so much of humanity with its own murderously
cruel authority figures is excruciating to behold.
We hear the whispering of an entirely different reality: "It doesn't
have to be this way." And the whisper grows louder and clearer by
the day.
In fact, nothing has to be the way it is: we are making it all up together
as we go along. How hard can it be to understand such a hair-tearing obvious
fact? Yet this simple truth is so hard to spot that it is taking small
eternities for the average human to notice it. Too many of us still confuse
living with that mind-eating heart-stopping stream of incessant technological
conditioning. And our civilization's nonstop death ray is most likely being
piled atop the underpinnings of an increasingly regressive childhood "education"
and "upbringing". It never took teams of professional thugs in
black leather with sophisticated weaponry to force children to learn, early
and often, to please the big powerful people all around them- or else.
The result is that too many of us end up being cowed by the depths and
heights of our own existence. How many spend the better part of a lifetime
living in polite masked terror of their own potentials, afraid to color
outside the lines of the cartoon book of enforced choices? We are being
carefully redesigned to move restlessly from external stimulus to external
stimulus, so that we will successfully manage to avoid ourselves until
the day we die. Meanwhile, the future of the human race is always under
construction, arising out of each passing moment's worth of assorted subjective
and objective human activities. And there is no granite anywhere in any
of this, except what one generation after the next pours around its own
feet. Even the heaviest blocks of custom are made ultimately of thin air,
supported by dull and fearful acquiescence.
For the human race these are hard times, times ten. But worry and fright
are not problem-solving states, or adjuncts to usefully understanding how
to get from here to there. Everything we see can be changed. Everything
depends on how many of us will try to think things through, and out the
other side. The first requirement is to imagine, in vivid and loving detail,
the future we want for everyone. The second step is to extract a personally
practical possibility from the vision, and adopt it as beloved necessity.
And the third part is to make working on necessity attractively contagious.
We already know that neither love nor reason can be forced to emerge from
the entirely unwilling. We want to magnetize those fairly ripe for reason
and love. Therefore applied thoughtfulness is necessary for the duration
of this work in progress, which is, after all, nothing less than the creative
resurrection of our own endangered species.
All eventually learn discernment, wishing to add loving livingness to the
sum total of dead weight this poor planet is carting around. We learn to
look for the cracks through which to smuggle joy and new life into the
morbidity zones of mass consciousness. We learn something of the impossible
patience of saints. We learn to renounce navely-exaggerated expectations
for immediate grand transformations. We come to realize that evolution
is a road so long that we can barely see around the next curve. This is
where heightened awareness of who we really are underneath the crust of
craziness comes in handy.
There is something in us so profoundly solicitous for our own species,
that even now in its worst moments, we can remember the future. There is
a strangely buoyant spirit propelling us through the noisome trenches,
filled to overflowing as they are with the smelly effluvia of human ignorance.
This core of detached and loving persistence cares nothing about our individual
surface reactions to the Big Bad Predicament. Even when we are too tired
to move, there is that within us which smiles benignly at the drama of
our personal reactions to world suffering and needless stupidity. The mysterious
spirit of evolution itself is carrying us forward despite everything, dragging
us by the feet when necessary, over the vast and painful terrain of Kali
Yuga. We can all perceive the vision of a far better future because it
already exists. Yet it remains out of reach except by the slow process
of making it happen through our own bodies. A glorious future will not
be handed over on a silver platter mysteriously descending from the blue
sky. The grunt work of manifesting a marvelous future, bit by bit, straining
it through every pore, is up to those on the ground. Somehow we know this,
whether we ever thought about it not. The sure sign is caring. If you care,
you know.
But now we are obliged to tiptoe toward a most disconcerting question.
Does the power of human folly to wreak worldwide wreckage really reach
a planetary scale? Could we actually finally succeed in species suicide
by means of rank idiocy? Whether one fervently believes yea or nay, the
gloomy possibility must be considered on its horrible merits. We know the
failing state of the natural world. Through and through, the basic elements
of nature are sick. Technically speaking, there is not even any pure surface
water left on Earth. The earth is suppurating with toxins. Our atmosphere
is being transformed into a nauseating poisonous parody of itself: chemically
and electromagnetically altered by military-industrial maniacs. No one
really knows exactly why, and they aren't telling. But then, we each have
our own grief-ridden list of current mortal offenses: that cross of painful
awareness we bear up under as best we can.
Even so, the evidence of our present overall failure to thrive does not
add up to an unredeemable end. There is a template within us that measures
all we perceive against genuine human potentials. This subjective presence
of an accurate measure of all things is precisely what causes us to suffer
so much under limited and even very dark circumstances. If we did not somehow
contain the original gold standards of sanity, reason and love within ourselves,
we would not notice the stark absence of these same qualities in world
affairs. This is a fact with infinite ramifications.
Down along the evolutionary road, around some unexpected bend, every individual
sense of identity undergoes a momentous revolution. Sooner or later, in
one life or another, the steely shell of self-concern breaks, and out pops
a fresh wet human possessed of a world-hearted mind and a world-minded
heart. The individual becomes acutely aware of the reality of the Whole:
awareness emerges, deeply surprised, into the limitless sphere of the greater
universe. Everyone and everything we thought was ours turns out already
to belong to a previously unimaginable We. Best of all, there is nothing
special about this process. Escape from the womb of the wall-off bricked-up
separated self is everyone's destination, eventually. The attainment of
any resides in the many. In between the evolutionary extremes of ego and
enlightenment, it's the "sooner or later" part that remains negotiable.
To a degree, we decide on our own quantity and quality of prolonged suffering
in this matter. This is true for a person, and equally true for an entire
species of sentient beings. Shall we dance- or continue to fight? This
seemingly simple decision can obviously take a very long time, while rivers
of blood flow under the bridge.
But we will certainly arrive at a world beyond stupidity, provided enough
of us never cease traveling in that direction. And we already remember
what it is like.
On those sunny uplands of a far-off yet nevertheless very real potential
future, most of humanity will have emerged successfully from the thrall
of egotism. We will stand together for the first time, facing the starry
immensities surrounding us with wonder and determination. But no healthy
creature can be prematurely or violently torn from an outworn form, however
constricting and painful. The path up and out of our cocoon is only found
through intense, intelligent and patient struggle, little by little. We
must never be dismayed by this truth, because we will be worth waiting
for. We are an unusually unlovely grub. But the particular butterfly we
are destined to become is also exquisitely iridescent, wondrously formed,
and possessed of the power to fly into infinity.
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