Life. What do we do with it?
We think we live life, when the common reality is that life lives through us. Most people live by accident, believing we have little or no control over what happens to us. We accept the bad times, welcome the good times and do nothing to promote or evade either. Why this should be so, has fascinated me for a long time. A very long time ago, it occured to me to look at the world as if I were watching a television screen. Placing an imaginary frame around everything in view. Like driving a car or sitting on a bus, looking out of a window into a world beyond. Not part of it; separated, watching. At the time, television was black and white, colour TV’s hadn’t been invented, so as a child, watching these colour images happen right in front of me was an amazing revelation. It eventually dawned on me that what I was seeing was my life, my reality, being played out, right in front of my eyes; and I wasn’t in charge of any of it. Life just happened whether I wanted it to or not. So I decided to experiment; to see if there was any choice in what happened to me, to live purposefully, deliberately choosing experiences to have. Difficult at first, but we can do this. I soon became accustomed to doing what I wanted, when I wanted, when the expectations of others were absent. But then, I wasn’t fitting in with people around me. Friends would invite me to join them and sometimes I would. But more frequently, their choices were dull. Or I’d had the experience they were pursuing. I joined groups of people who were doing what I wanted to do, then leave for another group. Again and again, until I began pursuing my own dreams and agendas, alone.
Have you ever bought a lottery ticket? Do you dream about what you’d do with a big lottery win? What would you start with? How would you go about making your dreams come true? Throw money around? Buy bigger, more expensive toys? There are better ways to improve lives.
Chances are your desires already are within your reach. The greatest endowment a big lottery win will bestow is permission. Everyone you know – and don’t know, will expect you to change your life, and a big lottery win will allow you to do that by taking away any censure to stay in your place; keep your head down and get on, believe you’re better than your peers or get ideas above your station. Possession of obscene amounts of money allows all these things, but you don’t need it. You don’t need permission to be who you really are, or to live the life of Your choice. Seeking permission to do what you want, from anywhere, is to accept you’re only part of a larger group, a tribe whose consent is demanded; not an individual but part of a heirarchical collective, a myrmidon, a worker, a drone, maybe an artisan. Not confident enough to choose freely, any path or journey, experience or choice, without considering the thoughts and opinions our tribe, friends and peer groups might have of us. A functioning member of the society in which we live.
What do we actually need? Warmth, water, food and shelter? Security, companionship, health and imagination? The list can go on for as long as we can dream. Friendship beyond relationship, quantity beyond need and access to everything we can think of? When does need become want? The most successful entrepreneurs, business men and women, construct a machine – a business to make money or vacuum money out of society. Some of these machines have led to increasing wealth inequalities simply because their business model was so successful. But most of us already have what we need, inside, built in. In our emotional security; intellectual balance and sense of sufficiency. Is it sane and rational to pursue the accumulation of wealth for its own sake? Beyond reason? Beyond all reasonable need?
Security of self, knowing who we are, is our greatest strength. Secure, living in the universe we know to be our own, this single fact is seldom articulated because it’s so obvious, we don’t need to until we lose sight of our origins. Our Universe is aware of itself, we are an expression of it. One of many. If we can claim to be sentient, can we claim the Universe is also sentient? It has power, a positive and negative aspect; energy, direction and a purpose – like humanity. Self determining, just as we can choose to be.
We have to be wary of giving the power in our Universe a name, of calling it anything by which it can be identified, for the same reason different religions call ‘their’ deity by a single name. Even among the same religion, adherents use different names. Between religions, adherents claim their deity is the right one, the correct one, the only one and any other name is a different deity and therefore a minor deity. We have a Universe and all we know and are is from that same Universe. So is our Universe Prime Creator? Or, through our imaginations, are we?
Identified and named as a single entity, will we pile baggage onto the creative force in our universe, as has happened with our terrestrial religions? Will all human expectations be placed on this new deity – our universe? Blame attached when expectations are not met? More baggage, and because, by definition, it’s perfect and can’t be blamed, will we look at our fellows, judging them for reasons why our expectations have failed? Moderating our expectations, we plead for a better harvest. We’re asking in the wrong way. Develop a simple habit to ask for favour. When it doesn’t work, enhance the plea with a few obsequious phrases, observations; develop a ritual, ceremony, deification worship and rites. This is how dogma accrues. Other people want to help, so they ask the deity on behalf of others, becoming interlocutors and interpreters of the deity.
Poetry is written, recognising the deeds, favours and wonders ascribed to the diety, which are in fact, our own successes; words are set to music, sung as incantations and praise, intercession to get the deity’s attention before asking for favours. Occasionally, a small favour seems to be granted. Interdiction is accepted as a small price to curry favour, becoming control reducing the scope of life to that which is acceptable to the interlocutors – on the deity’s behalf. No. We’re on that path and we need to change direction away from where it’s taking us. The list of do’s and don’t’s from the interlocutors, becomes a wall. When a favour isn’t granted, nature damns us or life turns against us, more must be done to appease the deity for some unspecified wrong we’re doing. A ritual expanded; tributes increased, beg forgiveness for our weaknesses and accept our need for flagellation. The wall becomes two walls and still the deity isn’t listening to our pleas… until there are four walls and an edifice spreading like a cancer, stunting growth and limiting choices, reducing lives to humanity diminishing rituals. How we enslave ourselves.
We’re part of the universe we live in. A heirarchical structure based on frequencies and energies we’ve observed and measured. Even though we have the personal freedom to do whatever we choose while here, still part of a massive collective of one. That’s why we default to heirarchical structures; why we default to looking after other people, each other, and why we have lapsed into servitude to power, believing it to be acting in our best interests, without as much as a murmur of serious mass dissent.
From before the time we begin thinking and believing we know who we are, we know we belong here. This is our home for a while, in the human family, part of this Universe looking through the frame of human experience in its limited capacity of five senses.
Being an individual who is also part of a collective isn’t a contradiction. Human values allow our society to operate, to work in unison and harmony with each other. There have to be do’s and don’t’s. But when a group of people set themselves above others by force of arms or economic might and demand the right to be obeyed, they reinforce their own positions of individuality, often destroying every potential power block capable of rising against them. Even if this means reducing society to its core, individual components, by subverting societal cohesion.
