Tag Archives: life

Tyranny

Posted on by

We have a word to describe a society in which one must play by the rules of those with all the wealth and ‘power,’ a system designed by and for the wealthy and powerful: tyranny. While most people would scoff at the idea of the USA being described as tyrannical, I would challenge them to think harder and longer on the nature and purpose of a state, or society, let alone a government, that purports to be working for the people, but has actually conned the people into working for them.

This is the free-est society in the world in many ways, but that does not mean it is free. As I have said before, you are free in this society as long as you play by the rules of the system. The ‘freedom’ we have in this society, in this system, is the freedom to not be a part of the system, and thus to either starve, die, or leave. Therefore, there is really no choice within the system, but rather of the system, to either be a part of the system or not. Those in power advertise the former while selling the latter.

As with any system, it is a scam.

And, further, it is no different than the purported ideological ‘enemies’ that the elite and wealthy of this society have sacrificed millions of poor people to fight and ‘protect’ ‘us’ against; ‘wars’ that are fought for the sole purpose of bolstering their positions of power and increasing their personal wealth. For, how is it any different for this society’s rule to be “either play by the rules or die” than a communist’s or dictator’s? Again, the only choice we have is no choice at all: to either be a part of the system or to not.

To focus the discussion, I am not saying that it is impossible for a person in this society to work outside the system. But the only way to truly work outside the system is to somehow have enough money to not have to work for money. Is it possible to pursue true happiness when you have to work full-time to make enough money to procure the basic necessities of life? I will not say it is impossible, but I would say it is as close to impossible as is possible to get.

I value love, creativity, enlightenment, and true happiness. As such, I would prefer a society, a system, in which such things are valued as well, a society that is geared towards the enlightenment and happiness of its citizens, not geared towards absolutely un-enlightened things, such as materialism, power over others, and personal wealth. “Looking out for number one” is one of the harsh lessons we learn in this society. It is, in fact, taken as wisdom to think this way. One of the reasons for this is that it is the only way one can survive in this society. If you do not look out for number one, you will not make it far, let alone live that long.

.

From my personal notes 8/13/00

What is Real Love?

Posted on by

It is interesting to me that in our contemporary American culture love is often seen (ironically enough) as a negative thing. People seem to fear love—either loving someone else, or someone else loving them. Unless they desire another person, and then they want love from them; but it seems that when someone says “I love you” to another person, they are really saying “I want you,” or “I need you.” And so, it makes sense that people would be resistant and wary of the sentiment.

In this culture, love is all about attachment and possession—”you belong to me,” “you are mine,” etc. Real love, conversely is not about attachment and possession at all.

And so, again, it makes sense that people do not work well with love, because though the word “love” is being used, love is not really what it is about.

People talk about love, they say they feel love, but most of the time it isn’t really love, it’s something else—desire, craving, need for validation or approbation, lust, etc. In addition, when most people “love” someone, it is about themselves, not the other person. Real love is not about “me” or “I.”

Real love is wholly non-threatening, for it is inclusive and non-judgmental; there are no ulterior motives in real love; a person who really loves is not out to get anything, or prove anything, or replace anything. People in this society do not know how to love because they do not know what love is.

.

From my personal notes, 8/13/00

I Am a Student of Life

Posted on by

So, when I say that when I see people I understand them and so can move on [see "I Study People"], it is not that I claim to understand the complexity of who they really are, nor that I understand ‘the human’ and the entire human condition, because I do not, and never claimed to. I would love to deal with, and interact with, and learn from, who people really are; the problem is that most people simply do not live on that level, their true ‘not-selves’ are hidden behind their wall(s).

I love to deal with who people are, but most of the time I only encounter what they are, for they do not express who they are, they do not want to, and often mistake what they are for who they are.

What someone is interests me very little. This is what people do not understand about me. They think I hate people, or that I think I am above them, or better than them or something. But that is not the case. Not even close. I love people. But I don’t like the façade, and most people live their lives with the façade in full swing, and I am over the façade, I get very little out of it except for those surface-level pleasures we can get from it. And I can enjoy such pleasures as much as the next person, but I see them for what they are, and they are certainly only a part of life; but for most people it is their entire lives. Now, again, I’m not saying that people aren’t ‘deep,’ or complex, but rather that they simply don’t tap into that (for lack of a better term) ‘truer’ part of themselves very often, at least around other people (if they’re even able to, that is, which is up for debate).

I simply can’t live most of my life on that essentially superficial level. I don’t want to. Who people are, and ‘whos’ interacting with each other, speaks to what I love about life, the beauty and passion and vitality of life. This is what I want. It’s just hard to find.

Now, a lot of people, some of whom are very smart, get a glimpse of all this, see that ‘the superficial world’ and the so-called pleasures of life are not what it is all about, and they take the other extreme; they deny this part of life, they deny or dismiss the illusory Matrix, and try to focus instead on what they think is not the Matrix. Examples are religious ascetics and philosophers who focus on metaphysics. I think that this is a mistake.

It is important to point out here that I am aware of—and recognize the truth of—the idea, which some ancient Hindus seemed to understand very well, that the path to enlightenment is through the self; in other words, that the ‘divine’ is (‘in’) everything. Or, said another way, that the only way to get to reality is by way of the illusion. To ignore or attempt to side-step the illusion is to ignore reality. To attempt to bypass the illusion, and try to find a positive metaphysics or spirituality, is to completely miss the point, to veer completely off the path. It is, in reality, an exercise in futility.

And so the point is that only by living life can we understand what lies beneath the surface. We can only get to the beauty and reality of truth and life by way of the illusory. This touches on the human truth that only through suffering and hardship comes enlightenment, understanding. And so it is true that we must jump in and live life, we must look to life for the answers. All of the answers, all of reality, is to be found ‘in’ the illusory, is to be found through the illusory.

I’m not the one to say where each person is on their path. But just because someone has an experience does not mean that they will learn from it, really gain from it. Most experiences are wasted experiences. Especially because people focus so much on the immediate, on the visceral, on the pleasure-principle. They mistake pleasure, and the fulfillment of desire, for happiness.

So, again—it is not what you experience but how you experience it that matters. Even people who crave new experiences can be in rut if they are not really moving forward with or because of those experiences.

The stuff of life is our material, it has within it everything we need to learn and grow and move to the ‘next level’ of being. This is why I say I am a student of life. It takes time and effort. There is no getting around this. There are no short cuts, at least that I am aware of. And the person who really gets it would never want a short cut, because he/she would see the ignorance, selfishness, and futility of looking for one.

The effort needs to be put in.

Maybe, like childbirth, it is harder for some, easier for others. This is fine with me. I don’t think this is unfair. It is simply the way it is. But, I think that it is safe to say that it is much harder, and takes much more time and effort, than most people realize. Especially when they do some of that effort and get a little along and then either get tired or sick of it, or realize that they can’t get the things they desire in life while doing it, and they decide that they ‘get it’ and stop. I think this happens often with people who make a little effort. And it is why any time I encounter people who think they get it, who think they have done it, I say that that is the only sign I need that they haven’t.

Anyone who thinks they ‘know’ surely does not. It’s actually quite nice and tidy the way that works. Another example of life being infinitely more simple, and more complex, than most people understand.

.

From my personal notes, 8/12/00

I Study People

Posted on by

I study people. I want to understand why and how they do what they do. [I also study what I call "the system," or "the Matrix" (as metaphor, of course).] I am not studying this in order to be a part of it, for selfish reasons, to get the better of others, to be able to manipulate them to my will, to better get what I desire. My goal is happiness for people, for life.

But while I study the system, ‘the matrix,’ I know that it is not real in the way reality is real. To do within and of the system is not to be a part of the solution. The point is not to give this illusory existence more credit than it deserves, not to buy into it too much, but rather to see it as, and for what, it really is. And as such, my study cannot fit into any of the established –ologies, for these branches all study the human condition while simultaneiously buying into what ‘is’ without the understanding of the difference between what is and what really is.

One cannot buy into the illusion if he/she wants to understand reality. You can’t look to the illusion to give you positive knowledge of realty; rather, you must study the illusion as an illusion, and as such, ‘negatively,’ in that you learn from the illusion what is not, not what ‘is’. It is about direction, and I think that most people are going in, approaching stuff from, the wrong direction.

One of the reasons I mention this is that people may wonder why I don’t study most people in more depth. It is because most people are not study-worthy. Most people live and express themselves as an illusory ego-self, and as such are boring to me.

Most people are at a level of denial, their wall is at a certain place, and, as such, one can only go so far with learning from them.

Everyone is as complex as everyone else. The difference is where their walls are. And so it ends up being a matter of speculation—which can be fun, but ends up being academic.

The point is that people who are mostly controlled end up behaving in the same ways as other people who are controlled. And so it gets repetitive. After initially getting to know people, they tend to be fairly derivative, which is a bummer, because I wish they would be more original—meaning: more themselves; not simply a product of the typical illusions by which most people live their lives.

If such-and-such a person is not able, or willing, to push the wall back, then there’s nothing to learn from them, as all you’re going to get is their conditioned self at the level of unawareness at which they live and are.

And so I may go out with a friend, who I know is incredibly complex under the surface, but if they hide that complexity behind the wall, all I get is what is in front of the wall, and after a time, I’ve seen what there is to see, and it is often quite similar to what is in front of most people’s walls.

I get it. I’m interested in who people really are, not (just) what they have in front of their walls. The problem is that it is hard to find people whose walls are not so far out in front of their real beings. This is why I don’t spend so much time on most people, on those who are so plugged into the system, for though I think it is important to study and try to understand the system, we must keep in mind that it is a system, it is the Matrix, it is not reality, it is an illusion, it is what it is. And keeping that in mind, it is waste of time to spend time on that which will provide me with no further understanding.

I am sure that there is a lot out there that will give me more understanding, whether it be art, people, experiences, places, etc. And these are the things I want to seek out. The surface level of why people do what they do is rather simple once it is understood. Which essentially comes down to ego and selfish desire. On the other hand, it is what happens—what people are like, who they are when they deal with these issues, when they really start to ‘awaken’, when they start deconstructing their conditioned existences—that I am interested in. For that is closer to, and in the direction of, reality, love, truth, what really is. Unfortunately, it has been my experience that such people are rare, and thus hard to find.

.

From my personal notes, 8/12/00

Life is Messy

Posted on by

Life is messy. People can go through life trying their best to keep it clean, tidy, and in order, stagnant and unchanging, but life is a process, it is always changing, and the less we go along with that—the less we are able to adapt to it—the harder things will be for us.

To be sure, there are those who are so good at keeping reality at bay that they never have to deal with it. They may take this as a sign that the things I am talking about are wrong, but I still think that an avoidance of reality is an avoidance of reality, and that they will eventually have to deal with it, for I think that all things move towards reality, towards truth, that even though humans effectively think they are the masters of the universe, they most certainly are not; and even they will be drawn towards reality, for that is the major force of life; it is life.

One, very small, tiny person’s avoidance of reality does not change what reality is, it doesn’t change the rules. We can break the rules, avoid the rules, live in denial of them, but that doesn’t change them, and we can’t avoid them forever—one life is but a blip on a blip of a blip to (essentialy) infinity. It means nothing in itself, but only as a part of the whole, part of the process.

To be sure, most of us, if not all of us, try to control and mold life to our liking. We try to freeze a reality that actually keeps on going and changing. We try to keep it tidy in ways that it simply can’t be so controlled. This is one of the reasons why we suffer so much. We have/create our illusions, and then we want to live them, and even egotistically mistake them for reality.

We stubbornly want things to be the way they simply are not, and we stand our ground, eyes clenched, refusing to let go.

It is this dissonance, this lack of harmony-unity by which we cause ourselves to suffer. It is not because ‘life sucks,’ but because of our own arrogance, weakness, and lack of understanding. We try to control life, we try to arrange life around ourselves, around what we believe and desire, but while life can be bent, it cannot be changed.

Reality can be seen in many ways, but it cannot be changed.

We try to bend life to our will, but it will never really work. Look at the Western mentality that is so well summed up by the general interpretation of the Bible. People think that they own the world, that they are the masters of the earth, and that it is our birthright to bend nature to our will. It is a wholly narcissistic perspective. What such people never realize is that we may manipulate nature, we may be able to mold it into shapes, like clay, but we are not changing the clay, we are not changing the ‘stuff of life,’ but merely manipulating it. We do not create but only ‘discover’ and form reality. We are born into a ‘clay’ that we can form and mold but do not ‘create,’ for we are of the clay, we are the clay. Why do we think we aren’t? Why do so many people assume such a duality? I see no good reason for it. (And while, to some, this might look like it would be compatible with ‘religion,’ and ideas of ‘gods,’ capital ‘g’ or otherwise, it most certainly is not. Oh, no, it most certainly is not.)

.

From my personal notes, 8/12/00

When Things Fall Apart

Posted on by

Our lives, the ‘houses of cards’ we’ve buillt around ourselves, can be so fragile.

Sometimes something happens, something comes along, or something just grows that we might not have seen before, or never dealt with, and was just lying dormant under the surface, and it is something that we can’t deal with, something that feels impossible to solve in the way that we would want to—meaning in a way that keeps us going in the direction we are currently going. It is one of those ‘change of venue’ things, that bumps you off course, and you realize that you might have taken for granted that the course you were on would just always go in that direction, and that you could deal with anything that came along.

But life doesn’t always work that way.

And, sometimes, what comes along tells us that the course we were on wasn’t exactly the right course. A lot about it might have been right, but it was a little off, and that ‘little off’ might—because it is only a little off, and because it is so hard to deal with that when so much else was going so right—cause trouble, and it is so hard to deal with, harder than if it was way off course, or if it was more cut-and-dried.

This is when life gets messy, and it becomes so hard to tidy it up. Unlike all the things that came along before, this one gets out of your hands and you can’t seem to get a grip on it all, you can’t seem to hold all the pieces in your hands—you keep trying to gather it all together, but when you pick up one piece, another piece falls, and then another, and then you lose where the first one fell, and so on, and it’s just a mess.

This also speaks to how fragile our lives, our constructed existences, can be; that one little thing can be the little stray piece of string that begins to unravel the whole thing.

What, in life, is harder than something like this? It is a total up-ending of a person’s understanding of life, of how they fit into the world. It’s an upheaval of the very foundation on which the rest of our life and identity rest. It literally feels like things are just falling apart.

These kinds of situations…going through them without denial is so hard. We are not conditioned to be able to go with life without at least some level of denial. We are too clingy. We are too forward-looking, and yet also too myopic. And so maybe if it happens once, even though there is the opportunity for growth—to be able to deal better with the flow of life—a person might instead react the opposite way, and instead of dealing better with life, instead of growing from and with the situation, they regress farther back, and get worse; because they have been so hurt and confused by this situation, they become more self-protective, and end up in more denial than before. This makes sense, if only because it is so hard, and most people don’t have the strength to go through that kind of thing and come out the other end better and more mature. I know it is hard for me. I think I’m doing it, but it’s very hard, and I sometimes feel like I’m walking on a tightrope.

How do different people deal with such things when they come along? Obviously people will deal with them differently according to their conditioning and their inner character, their level of open-mindedness or close-mindedness, their assumptions and beliefs.

.

From my personal notes, 8/12/12

Playing Games

Posted on by

One of the frustrations of this ‘Matrix‘, this society, is that it is so hard, and maybe even impossible, not to play games, because almost everyone is playing a game, whether they believe it or not.

The difficulty for one who does not want to play games is that most people do not even know how to not play games. And so if you, not wanting to play a game, approach someone who does not know how not to play games, then no matter what you say or do, they will see it as a move in a game, and there is nothing you can say or do about it, because whatever you say or do will be seen as another move, and on and on.

To be fair, the society—’the system’—in which we live today, is such that a person can’t trust anyone not to be playing games, because, well, as I have already pointed out, almost everyone plays them. So, rather than continue to be hurt and screwed over, a person will eventually give up trying not to play games.

This is one of the reasons why no one is trustworthy anymore, and why when you are trustworthy you will have such a hard time finding someone who will trust you. And how can you blame them? Well, I think we can blame them, for I do not think that self-imposed ignorance and repression is an excuse for remaining ignorant and closed-off to reality. But the point here is to show just how hard it is to live truthfully and honestly in such an untruthful and dishonest world.

.

From my personal notes, 8/10/00

Is Money Evil?

Posted on by

The basic tenet on which the/my ideas here are based is that what is ‘wrong’ is that which is based on illusion. And as such, the idea that justice can only exist as long as there exists the concept of property (ownership) is wrong because the concept of ownership is an illusion; then we can go on to realize that the concept of justice, as we know it, is an illusion as well, for that which is based on illusion is itself an illusion.

The U.S. ‘system’ is wholly based on the idea of ownership and property. Otherwise, how could they possibly have justified their invasion of this land and the slaughter of those who previously occupied it? Occupation is not ownership—it is occupation, spatially speaking. If I am holding something, I can say that I am ‘in possession’ of it, but that is not to say that I possess it in that I ‘own’ it, that it is ‘mine.’ And here we move into what is really at issue here, beyond the ideas of ownership and property. For we must question on what such concepts themselves are based. And what we find when we do so is that they are based on the concept of ‘self,’ of ‘I’ as opposed to ‘you,’ ‘mine’ as opposed to ‘yours.’ If there is no illusory self, no ‘individual,’ no separate and distinct ‘I,’ then there can be no ‘mine;’ there can be, in effect, no concept of ‘ownership’ at all, for without an owner, what can be owned, what is doing the owning? Nothing.

What we find, then, is that it is the concept of the self that is at the bottom of all these concepts, all of the concepts which make up the ideology of this system.

Many people who consider themselves to be enlightened, but who are really not much more than cynical, say that money is evil, that money is the root of all evil. But this is simple-minded. I would, rather, propose that the root of all ‘evil’ is the self. Without the self, how can I possibly do you wrong? How can I possibly be selfish, consider myself more than I do you?

And so we see that our morality, our values, our motivations, and all of our concepts that are subsequently built upon them, are based on the concept of self.

That which is morally right or wrong must be right or wrong in relation, in a context, and what provides that context is the self. ‘Right’ for whom?

Our understanding of morality is wholly dependent on the concept of the self. And if it is true that the self is an illusion, then the morality, and all that is based ideologically on it, is but an illusion, is wrong, fundamentally, wrong by way of its assumptions being erroneous.

The more one thinks about it, the more one examines the system in which he/she lives, he sees that everything by which he lives his life is based on created, human concepts which are not universal, nor objective, but are, rather, specific to a certain culture, a certain people (the survivors of the ‘might-makes-right’ idea), and thus, fairly arbitrary. This must be understood before any real change can occur. It precipitates the necessary step of realizing that that which was believed in and assumed to be true is not as true or justifiable as once thought. It forces one to abandon the foundation on which he has heretofore lived his life, because he recognizes that it is illusory. The problem is that since people are so conditioned to be weak, and to remain forever children, this process is resisted by most people, with ferocity.

And so we see that money, for example, itself is not evil, but rather it is the way it is understood and used that is or is not ‘evil.’ Money is but a tool—a means to an end. Just as a hammer is a tool—a means to an end. But a hammer can also be used as a weapon. So, what is it, a tool or a weapon? We see that ‘what it is’ depends on how it is perceived and used.

Money is not wrong. It, itself, is not evil, and, as such, need not be vilified and spurned for its own sake. To so so would be as ignorant as those who deify and overvalue money, who use money but are really used by it, and by that I mean by their own small-minded perception of what it is. To spurn money itself for no other reason than that it is money, and that it is currently misunderstood and misused by those who have the most of it for selfish and destructive reasons, is as ignorant as not using a hammer to help in building a house because you have seen it used as a weapon once.

.

From my personal notes, 8/10/00