Sunday morning and SooZen was using the computer which gave me time to waste away on the tube. Watching bits and pieces of different channels, from CSPAN to CBS, touching on some channel with a Sunday preacher, reinforces the fact that this is at once a both beautiful and terrifying world we all share.
Here in the States we are so divided in our political outlooks one could objectively conclude there is little hope in ever reaching a middle ground. That in and of itself is terror - fear of one political side no matter which side you are on. You'd think we live in two totally different regions of the world. The Conservatives blame the Progressives and vice-versa no matter the cause and yet here we are fighting a war or two in the Middle East... a Middle East which is now even in a more precarious position because of the health of Ariel Sharon in Israel. We hear the idiocy of Pat Robertson who blames Sharon's health on his giving away the Gaza strip, strangely the same position as the radicals of Judaism in Israel (whose name I don't recall).
The Palestinians are divided - the Muslims and the Christians (and probably a Jew or two mixed in the soup somewhere). The radical Islamists that what to kill all Americans... at least that is the battle call from the Republican controlled government in the U.S.. The divide of ideologies I read about in the U.K. add to the confusion one experiences when we simply observe the divide, no matter which side we may privately side with.
Yin/Yang, Yin/Yang... it's all polarization that wants control of everything... something that simple physics shows can never be. Take electric current - positive and negative... it's as though those that are on the side of the positive current want to quite the negative current and again, vice-versa (or is that yin/yang?).
The U.S. has the mantra that we are one nation indivisible for liberty and justice for all - a mantra that any realistic American knows is only a 'prayer' of hope that we cling to. All countries have their mantra's of what they want and hope for their people... nothing new, but what is new is the times we live in. Not so much the time itself but what the times have brought us.
Our world of communications has been vastly reduced - telephones, fax machines, television broadcasting and, of course, the internet. But even the speed of the internet is at the mercy of something like MicroSoft, who cut off certain types of access at the request of China.
This removal of digital free-speech is not something the government of China wants. What this particular government wants is much what any government wants and that is a certain stability and providing unlimited digital free-speech could provoke instability with a country of 1.3+ billion individuals. Imagine how dangerous 1.3 billion people could become if their government didn't hold the reigns! Maybe it's because not all the people can have access to the internet - unfair and may cause unrest because of the inequality... or maybe just give people more
individuality... I don't know.
Just around the corner from geopolitical China is India 1.1+ billion people but yet their government (multi-party) apparently has no restrictions to internet access. This is rather bold for the Indian government to do... at least in the eyes of the Chinese government (one party). India, the world's oldest democracy, is still standing... China, another ancient country that brought the world many things, is repressing it's people to a large extent, and it is still standing. Yin/Yang - polar opposites. Will they challenge each other to superiority - one better than the other?
Here in the U.S. (300 million), we have our Democracy (currently one party realistically speaking) and we have stood for 230 years - a far cry from the hundreds, even thousands of years both China and India have been, but we're here... a beacon of hope and dreams to the world, a world that doesn't see our underground of the impoverished and illiterate, but it's hope that matters.
Without hope people despair, but that one word, hope, is what Americans have in abundance - we hope to win the lottery, we hope to live in the big house, we hope to have material wealth, we hope for God to hear us, we hope to God that we make it through our dark hours, we hope to see a democracy in Iraq, we hope to remain the most powerful country on earth, we hope for a Cadillac SUV, we hope for new clothes, lots of food, we hope for more hope. We are not a hopeless lot.
But those hopes are ego hopes... for ourselves. Hope is much greater. Hope is something not exclusive of America or any other successful government. Hope is "the theological virtue defined as the desire and search for a future good, difficult but not impossible to attain with God's help" as the dictionary defines it.
We all hope when we do not have. It matters not what it is we don't have but if that which we do not have is either unattainable or difficult to attain we hope for it. It's human. We are human. But even hope is yin/yang - when we hope for the logically impossible, that which can only be in the realm of miracles, we are hoping for that 'pie-in-the-sky' that will certainly challenge our hope.. and we will lose.
Priests and Politicians offer hope - they freely pass it out to all that will listen, and there are many that do. They assure us that if we accept their ideas, their miracles of perfection, that we will be saved and have no more need for hope for then we will have it all. It'd be a miracle for sure if any one those folks 'snake oil cures' would really do completely what they said it would do.
But we persist in our human ways to get beyond our lives as they are and try to make life better. It's this word 'better' that inspires hope and all hope is not bad.
What is more important than hope is balance. Finding our own balance of living, of thinking, of reacting, of loving, of being. Each of us has our own level of balance. Our bodies need certain things that we all have in common - fresh air, fresh water, fresh food. Nowadays in our modern world those simple things are more and more unattainable. Our air is becoming more and more poisoned by various pollutants as is our waters. If the air and water is polluted it follows that our food, which is just as reliant as we are on freshness, cleanliness and purity of air and water, also suffers.
How much of our hopes has destroyed our world? Our worldly hope for oil has done much for the world's pollution. Our hope for a more chemical life has polluted our waters. Our hope for more and more food has brought more and more poisons upon our food stocks. Out of balance. When we dream of a world where we can transport ourselves in machines without the consequences of how those machines are made and how they are powered shortens the health or the planet.
To fulfill our hopes we require energy (power), and power is limited by the accessibility of fuel. For the people of great power (wealth), their fuel is money. But all power requires fuel is that power is directed towards some thing - a car, a woodstove, a telephone, an internet, etc... today's fuel is oil.. oil and money... we hope for both to maintain our balance with not with the world, but with our neighbors... all our egos crying out want, want, want. Our credit debt is enormous, our wants even greater... but the fuel - where do we get the fuel to sustain our power of wants and needs.
The world can sustain our human population... food, water, air, but the earth cannot sustain our hopes for the unrealistic and what makes the real un-real is lack of logic and common sense. We are driven by our hopes that cannot be had for all. And if all do not have access to the same common dreams, there follows revolt. The revolution may be people, but if we do not balance our hopes with logic, if we do not balance our wants with realism, the earth itself will revolt... it will have no choice.
There is hope. All is not hopeless in these trying times. People instinctively know what they need... if they will only take time to know their Self. People have historically been a collective of learning... we have learned so many things - from A thru Z we have studied the world and it's inhabitants, we've learned and continue to learn about our solar system, the constellations and galaxies, the oceans and skies... so many things we have learned, but in comparison, we have learned nothing about our Self, our original Being - that which existed before our bodies.. our 'orignal face' as it has been put.
Despite all our religions and sciences we have yet to fully grasp our own Being. This requires a further science, if you will - the science of our inner self. If we take this one step into our inner being, our very Self, we will change yet, onoce again, our direction in life. We will reinvent ourselves by knowing our Self. It would be religious without religion, it would be scientific without the science, it would be human without the ego. This giant step into our inner being would make for a world that hope has distorted and make it clear. It would alleviate war, it would alleviate greed, it would alleviate poverty... it would alleviate the need for government.
It sounds like bull-shit to you? I can hear you... pipe dreams... meaningless words to give false hope. A fantasy. But answer me was not a vehicle going to the moon and back a fantasy at one time? Was not a machine like the computer and internet simply a fantasy at one time? Was not even an automobile or an engine pulling cars filled with grains and coal, with foodstuffs and building supplies on tracks laid throughout the land a fantasy at one time?
Fantasy is imagination not yet realized. And not realizing your inner self allows one to believe that such an experience is 'fantasy.' But our imagination is what has brought us to where we are at today - language, numbers, architecture, music, cooking, clothing... the list is as long as humanity's time on earth. Without imagining all these things first they would never be. Hope springs from imagination - we imagine before we hope for the reality. Back then we thought the use of oil drilled from the bowels of the earth was good. We never imagined the byproducts of oil to contaminate our planet. If we did we never would have allowed it to become what it is today - a fuming, stinking, polluting, poisonous gas fouling our air, our waters, our soil.
We can reinvent our lives. We can live in harmony. We can eliminate injustice, hunger and poverty... if we only 'realize we can.' Realization is what is needed. It is within each and everyone of us to realize our inner being. The first step is meditation. (Yeah, I can hear some of you - "Meditation! Isn't that some Eastern yogi mysticism crap where you tie your body into knots and sit like a geek for hours on end?" or "If those that meditate are so wise why don't they do something to benefit the world..?" )
Meditation is the first step... it is not the complete journey. Meditation is a process of going within... unlike prayer, which is defined as "a reverent petition made to God, a god, or another object of worship." I underlined the word 'object' as it is pertinent. Meditation allows for the dissolution of objects. Prayer is made to God, a god or an object of worship means when we pray we 'see' a god or other religious object that we focus upon and we are praying (asking) for something. This is much different than 'meditation' which is an inward journey that will lead to self discovery (know thy Self), a 'Self Realization." This is a simple and basic process that has been proven to reduce high blood pressure, which is the physical reaction to stress levels out of balance. Many other benefits are included, but the whole concept is that meditation is 'the train taken to journey within' and within each and everyone of us there is our original being waiting for our arrival.
This experience of 'knowing thy Self' is completing what we are... becoming whole (holy)... fulfilled. The ultimate experience transcends our mind, goes beyond what we could possibly imagine. The experience is the true rebirth (reborn) that many have claimed, but have only imagined. With this new found wholeness we have changed. We have been reinvented and enter the world with new eyes, new possibilities, new energy, new, new, new.... available to all... necessary for all... to live in a world that is no longer a fantasy but the reality... remade as we have been reborn.
Cecil
08 January 2006
(todays music: Sheila Chandra "Quiet")
<center>enigma
(A/C - w/ sunlight on the right)</center>
<center>in the center
of us all
away from the
outer reality
resides the egg
waiting
to hatch our
Inner Self
it is this
rebirth
that brings us
Wholeness
of
Being
+++</center>
Glad you enjoyed the painting and poem... Thank you!
Couldn't agree with you more about the Neo-American Religion of Extreme Evangelists... I recently read that those boisterous groups only make up some 7% of the population... hard to believe when we are so subjected to their fanaticalism. Thanks, bud! 