My parents both made a living as teachers at one point or another - a happenstance that has made my existence infinitely richer; more so had i been a better student. Even today, at the ripe old age of 62, i still have trouble recognizing lessons; especially in the target rich confusion which defines our modern epoch. The reasons for this difficulty with seeing what there is to learn, are entirely my own - i’ve gotten that far, but i still have difficulty understanding this lack of clarity as irony or metaphor; i can hear my dead father’s voice just now - “either/or is a specious argument”; more likely, he’d have taken the Socratic path and simply asked “what if it is neither, and just plain old synchronicity?” Clearly, i come by an ironic prejudice honestly, but the seductive siren call to metaphor is my “Achilles Heel,” actually more of an Hephaestus gimp - the haunting ache of sciatica is just icing on the cake. Jalaluddin Rumi “The cure for pain, is in the pain.” Without getting into the morbid details, suffice it to say my 5 year sciatic torment has only been resolved by patiently and gently tearing internal fascia to accommodate a post surgical skeletal configuration gone bad - (kids, don’t try this at home). Having watched my mother remove stitches from the extraction of a sting ray barb i had found in the bay of Guaymas at age 7 gave me confidence in the old saw “doctor heal thyself.” Yet is this self care not consistent with all of human history prior to the rise of medical presumption born of Louis Pasteur’s discovery of the role of bacteria to infection? Healing and learning go hand and hand; however, just as everyone is not born to teach even though we each carry lessons with us to others - knowingly or unknowingly, so too we as a species have been blessed by healers, nor am i advocating on behalf of the medical industry which has sided itself with the profiteers gouging humanity into the dark ages. I’m addressing those souls who from whatever grace left to our kind bring warmth and awareness as their armament and love as their product. They are often outside any tradition, and likely as not would never lay claim to special gifts - a good indication that they are not adherents to the acquisitive free-for-all that defines the plundering of our commonwealth.
It is not as though we are lacking evidence or resources adequate to a better understanding about those responsible for this world plundering. Never in our shared history have we been more capable of surmounting language barriers, cultural barriers even obfuscation by the faceless cowards responsible for so much havoc, yet here we sit, minutes on the “Doomsday Clock” away from nuclear anonymous incineration along with a 12 foot rise in ocean levels hot on its heels, and we are absorbed by the buffoonery of leaders who have demonstrated their disinterest in our welfare. If we don’t don’t demand better from our leaders, our existence will be short. What if they are not our leaders, what if our leaders are those amongst us who care and are not caught up in the shared fiction of civilization? Socialization hasn’t done all that much for me - i learned as much watching my father die from an inoperable hip fracture as anything i’d ever learned in school. He showed courage; he demonstrated compassion though his pain was tangible enough to touch. Watching my mother confront her mortality has taught me more about grace and self-awareness than any psychiatrist attempting to reformat my particular brand of crazy. If anything, i’ve learned more from avoiding the effects of government than i ever benefitted from stop lights or government’s “war on everything.” How is it even possible that war is considered as a solution today? Who do i go to for an answer to that question? Murder ceased to be an option for me once i understood everyone dies; how could i waste the effort for something naturally occurring? What i don’t understand is how little i understand about understanding. From what i’ve read, one’s ideas about something have little bearing on the act of being, yet mindfulness is somehow the key - is that what is mean by paradox? What of possessions - were did this attachment to objects develop? Were we born slapping away the mother’s tit to get a hold of the flickering screen on a telephone? Early on, i realized there was no other thing more important to me than owning my own time, yet with death as my next great adventure even that possession is rapidly receding into the horizon.
It’s been said “time is money;” what i don’t understand is how the oligarchs have convinced my compatriots to sell theirs so cheaply, and so what if you have more money than Croesus and you are lost in your own skin. Of the many benefits of being born to educated parents, high on the list would be learning about Nikos Kazantzakis before i was out high school — if you don’t read, there is a movie starring Anthony Quinn called “Zorba the Greek.” As a young post WWII adolescent wandering into the shared hallucination that became the 1960’s, this story chases to the core the shared hallucination of our internet age; we are all alone, a reality which does not absolve us of the very real need to try and understand what we are isolated from and to learn as deeply as possible what autonomy means. Today, my internet is down, it has been for two days. Fortunately, i had weened myself from my phone months ago, so as an older person born to reading, when the fiction of human contact was yanked from my screen, i did what any normal person would do - i began reading milk cartons - kidding, sort of. What i carry with me in travel is Richard Wilhelm’s translation of the I Ching, with a forward by Carl Jung. What i discovered within 10 pages is as though new age rigamarole is more than echoes of bad acid trips; drug deals gone haywire, or homilies on impatience and poor choices. Is is possible that we’ve been lied to again - that the internet is not here to save us, but to delude us into believing we are something other than 7 billion individuals, each with rights and responsibilities to live as freely and completely as possible without causing harm to each other. That is a hard lesson to swallow when there are so many shouting that the path to freedom is only possible at the cost of another person’s freedom. Until we as a species fully understand that success is not one’s to own, but one’s to give in service, we are doomed. I could be wrong ask anyone who has told me what i must do, or can’t say.
Having worked some years in the engineering field, i learned the 1st Law of Engineering for any important project is to identify the problem; the 2nd Law states - “10% of the work is done in 90% of the time and 90% of the work is done in 10% of the time,” and the 3rd Law - “the last thing to get fixed on any project, is blame”. In today’s world of problems, we are living in the midst of what The Military Industrial Complex designates as “a target rich environment”. Another pertinent expression is “long pole in the tent” meaning, what is the long lead item? In our world, that would be SURVIVAL OF THE SPECIES - some people will survive, many won’t. Who are those that will survive and why? The rich believe that their bunkers and hordes of cash will suffice; i’m thinking that sort of narrow vision is what has gotten us into this mess. It describes a lack of understanding or interest in the physics of the natural world - the interdependence which water flowing from the mountain snow pack to the ocean knows by the behavior what is logical, but which man’s arrogance believes otherwise - that somehow massive damming and diversion of this essential component can accommodate its poisoning ad nauseam which the excessively wealthy fossil fuel industry then pours on the dying embers of our kind - our life blood. Sort of like the thug who believes he can punk everyone in the neighborhood, but the supplier. What exactly does it mean to survive, when as individuals we’ve barely reached the threshold of self knowledge? In one of the quotes from the forward to the I Ching, Carl Jung elaborated on the paradox of this point, “I of course am thoroughly convinced of the value of self-knowledge, but is there any use in recommending such insight, when the wisest of men throughout the ages have preached the need of it without success?” One of our presidential candidates has stated “i could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody, and i wouldn’t lose any voters.” Thankfully this assertion was never put to the test, yet since this declaration on January 24, 2016 with an average of 1,000 gun deaths per month in the United States, 9,000 people have died; what does that tell you about the level of self-awareness in my nation? that the big “D” is the most self-aware man on the planet? G_d help us all.
“Is there a lesson here” you might ask? Don’t run for president if you are a self-aware, narcissistic sexual predator without a keen sense of when and what not to say? The fact of his eventual death is hardly the long pole in the tent; we’re all gonna die. However, do you really want your unborn generations facing the world he intends to leave by gutting all environmental research, and stacking the already weighted tax coder further in favor of the largely inherited wealth of the ruling class? Please remember, his children were raised under his influence in so far as an emotional cipher is capable of raising children, and do also remember these same offsprings will have more money than the budget of 5 western states; by the time this essay is published later today, that number of states will have become 6. How is one to cultivate a culture of concern for others in this swamp of conceit we call civilization? How is it possible, when as Carl Jung so clearly pointed out, people know what to do - know thyself - but choose not to? I’m at a loss but write because it pleases me to not have surrendered; in writing, i have no one to answer to for my flawed thinking but my own happy fingers. I may never know whether this conceit is of any service to anyone but those who benefit from scratching their heads as i wander in and out of my hermit’s cell checking my pot of beans. Caring has not abandoned me while my predilection for shared hallucination continues to haunt my steps and inform my confusion until, as has just happened, the opiate that is the internet blinks on and assuages my solitude with pretty pictures of empty homilies and defanged rancor across the pixels of my despair - feels like a slogan for which Master Leonard Cohen has sagely counseled against in writing - clearly a lesson i’ve yet to learn. But where is our “Tower of Song”? where is the nexus of our resistance to the unctuous arrogance of corporate stupidity - when will the population of earth learn lessons which are seemingly known only by those valiant Human Beings fighting for our WATER and our survival @ Standing Rock?
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the student
Why do some people learn and not others?
Why are some lessons clear and some opaque?
Why do some lessons repeat for lovers,
and some have one shot to get past the ache?
Why is it so hard to share what you’ve learned?
Why do some lessons come with a teacher?
Why is some wisdom just from what you’ve earned,
and some found by sitting in a beach chair?
Can one pick and choose what one wants to learn?
Can one grow understanding like a plant?
Can one forget what was learned from a burn
or like weight - carried to doom by an ant?
I can’t answer any of these questions
but will chase their answers to their bastions.
its 103116
http://JosephTStevens.blogspot.com
http://stoanartst.blogspot.com
reprinted with permission; all rights reserved
∞
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