Sunday Stream (59) ~ Preachers and Politicians

[mtmynd]

<center>Preachers and Politicians</center>

Preachers and Politicians - two groups that try to fool us into following their way to a better life than we have now. It's been going on for centuries... the preacher rambling on about how to achieve the eternal peace offered by a Heaven or what ever word resembles it and the politician supposedly having the answers for a new and improved, peaceful and secure social existence.

We follow those words in hopes of getting out of our despair and uneasiness with where we are at only because we are made unsure of our own lives. Should we causally disregard the words on a Jesus or a Buddha or a Mohammed, those that speak of a God that will never let us down and always be there whenever we are on our last leg... a leg that has been broken by the burdens put on us by the politician and their own insistence on knowing how to make our lives better?

One and the same, they operate on our emotions. They've learned from years of practice how to push our buttons so we feel guilt and shame, hope and promises, of something much better than what we have. We swallow it... hook, line and sinker every time. Who doesn't want a 'better' life than what we have. Even the preacher and politician want a better life. And how do they attain this 'better' life? They trick us with their visions to follow them and by following them we give them power.

Power is the crux of attaining the illusive 'better'... a better diet, a better mate, a better home and automobile, a better facade for others to admire and hope to emulate.

Our own lives are never good enough. Our hearts continue to beat, our lungs continue to inhale and exhale the same air as all of life, but we so want to become much more than what we are. We're willing to do damn near anything to have the power to create ourselves into what ever we want. We are never satisfied with simply what we are and what we have.

We supplicate ourselves before the preacher in hopes of attaining the same God Goodness that they certainly must have - just listen to them! Bow before their God and you will have riches like you've never dreamed possible! If only you'd follow them... without question, without doubt, without logic and reason. It sounds so easy that any moron could do it, and many do... but how many of those unquestioning believers receive the same power as the preacher?

The same with the politician - trust them, follow them and their vision. They don't want you to question their authority... just believe them and they will make your life 'better.' How could we not follow them like lemmings..? We might lose that promised 'better' life. Our own life is not enough... who listens to us, who admires us, who gives us respect..?

But maybe, just maybe, if we follow the preacher or the politician we might get 'better.' Despite the fact that the vast majority of humans are basically 'good'... we have to get beyond that. We've made the words for it: good, better, best... and we've got to achieve those levels. Bullshit!

What is 'better' than good? With so many good people all over this planet, giving of themselves, raising families, working to sustain their communities, making love, celebrating their joys...you'd think that was sufficient for any of us. It is. It's those damned preachers and politicians that have no good in them that seek it through other preachers and politicians... all because they themselves are unhappy and want more. Priests and politicians only seek power, and with it recognition from either others of their kind or the community they work for. They are the unhappy and unfulfilled, following with a religiosity the footsteps of those that they admire, in hopes of attaining the equal promised gifts that were bestowed upon their 'heroes'... never answering their own inner voice, denying their individuality... a crime against the very ‘God’ they worship in the outer world rather than listen to in their inner world.

Preachers praying for a better life, politicians preaching for a better life, each using their own image of who they follow without question... and expecting us to do the same. Preachers that follow the words of Jesus to hopefully make themselves into a Jesus, the followers of Buddha seeking to make themselves into a Buddha, the priests of Islam reading and re-reading the words of Mohammed so they can become another Mohammed.

And look at politicians. No difference... they want to be like Jefferson or Lincoln, Stalin or Marx, Reagan or Kennedy... you name them, there'll be a politician following the party line of one they submit to.

The logical question in what I have listed here as examples is: "Who did Buddha or Jesus or Mohammed follow?" or "Who did Jefferson or Marx or Lincoln follow?"

Those examples, and numerous others, I answer: "They followed their own inner voices." Obscure? Illogical? No.

That 'inner voice' is always there within us. It is up to us, given our individuality, to listen to it and respond. It take true faith and belief to listen to our instinct, our Jiminy Cricket. Listening to our inner voice enables our individuality to become what we are. It doesn't rely upon blind faith from a preacher or a politician. It requires a level of faith in ourselves to accept those messages, either through silent words or reactions to our emotions.

Historically the people that listened to their inner voice have become their own people. Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, Moses, Jefferson, Roosevelt, Kennedy, Marx, Einstein, Edison, Newton, Beethoven, Kandinski... the list is long and the list is varied, but what they all have accomplished is listening to their inner voice to bring about change, to bring about good. No need to put on blinders and follow their changes, but to acknowledge that those that listened to their inner voice and responded have found their individuality. It spreads the 'good' and what is better than good? Good is the best we can all become if we will slow down our rush to keep up with others and tune in to our own being... listen to our unique message and not the message of others, for that is a denial of who we are.

How many ideas and dreams have escaped becoming reality by those that dismissed their own being... their own voice? Imagine a world where all took time to listen to their own Self and shared the message... the preachings of priests and politicians would be drowned out in the good that would abound.


Cecil
11 December 2005

[taken 12/04/05: I-10 West]


<center>the cactus and grasses
co-existing on a cliff
nobody to tell them
it can't be done
but only listening
to their own being
surviving where they are
where they should be</center>

[Artguy]

Precisely why I ignore all those that know more ...that want to lead me to greener pastures...that want to make better trade deals on my behalf....that want to lead wars on my behalf.....that want to show me the moral road to heaven...precisely why I take advice from the changing of the leaves....falling of snow...my empty original mind...the smile of my child...the caw of the morning crow...the crispness of a winter morning....the shuffle of my own feet upon the fragile earth.................................................................................................

[Arcadia]

maybe we don´t need more preachers but it seems that in our system we still need políticos, that´s a problem.
thanks for the stream!
saludos,

Arcadia

[tinkerjack]

Historically the people that listened to their inner voice have become their own people.

I like Joseph Campbell’s metaphor of what it means to find the Holy Grail It is to live a life of one’s own, an authentic life.

"the Grail becomes symbolic of an authentic life that is lived in terms of its own volition,...that carries itself between the pairs of opposites of good and evil, light and dark. Every act in life yields pairs of opposites in its results. The best we can do is lean toward the light, toward the harmonious relationships that come from compassion with suffering...that is what the Grail is about."

http://merganser.math.gvsu.edu/myth/nov01.html

that want to show me the moral road to heaven

THE "IMPROVERS" OF MANKIND

5 The morality of breeding, and the morality of taming, are, in the means they use, entirely worthy of each other: we may proclaim it as the supreme principle that, to make morality, one must have the unconditional will to its opposite. This is the great, the uncanny problem which I have been pursuing the longest: the psychology of the "improvers" of mankind. A small, and at bottom modest, fact--that of the so-called pia fraus [holy lie]--offered me the first approach to this problem: the pia fraus, the heirloom of all philosophers and priests who "improved" mankind. Neither Manu nor Plato nor Confucius nor the Jewish and Christian teachers have ever doubted their right to lie. They have not doubted that they had very different rights too. Expressed in a formula, one might say: all the means by which one has so far attempted to make mankind moral were through and through immoral.

Taken from Twilight of the Idols
http://bbs.anus.com/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb= ... 0&go=older



Politics is bad enough, democracy sucks, but Theocracy is hell on wheels. We are moving that way in the USSR, I remember the good old days of politicians paying lip service to the Gods. Now we got true believers. I watch them on TV with their shark teeth smiles. Very confident that they have us by the by the …..

The True Believer," though, is not solely concerned with the rise of Nazi Germany, but with the origination of all mass movements, creative or destructive. And more importantly, it is concerned with the main ingredient of such movements, the frustrated individual. The book probes into the psychology of the frustrated and dissatisfied, those who would eagerly sacrifice themselves for any cause that might give their meaningless lives some sense of significance. The alienated seek to lose themselves in these movements by adopting those fanatical attitudes that are, according to Hoffer, fundamentally "a flight from the self."

http://www.erichoffer.net/

Bushies base is the undead who go to mega churches, thousands of members. There is one that used to have sevices in the Houston Astrodome. 16,000 people on a Sunday. The number one selling book in the United States is The Purpose Driven Life.
Purpose is a big deal here on the christian right. The march in lock step to the party line. Seems like no body wants to find their own way anymore.

Good stream Cecil, spot on.

[Arcadia]

"hell on wheels", funny expression and you´re right. I only have a representative crisis, that´s all.

[tinkerjack]

An old saying, probably military in origin

Yeah we got a double cry sis over here.
We all have our karma as individuals, and I am not even sure what karma means, you reap what you sow? but I would not like to believe that governments and nation states have karma. If they do we are between a rock and a hard place.

Political lies and Priestly lies, we got the double whammy.

Sometimes I feel like the German Jew in Katherine Anne Porter's Ship of Fools.

This president of ours, a man that talks about battling "dark forces" is a whack job.
This is such a weird country, maybe because we are so Mongrelized

I try to remember The Things Of New Spain, and the mythology of the people who were here before us. The white face god who does not demand human sacrifice is over throw, The Trickster rules