You can fly away electric bird.
I wonder where angry protesters live these days. I wonder where the angry protester is in all of us. It seems to me that we've rolled over and sold out; that we have no fight in us because we're too busy marketing ourselves to the world. Maybe we should come with a price-tag.
We whore around, and there's no denying it. So, as much as you don't want to hear my complaining, you probably need to. I'm an optimist, and I'd like to think that I'm a pacifist, but I have too quick of a temper. I also have a sense of inner calm within me, in the midst of my most uneasy or violent emotions. I always know that "this too shall pass," and that there is always the state from which everything arises and to which everything returns. I trust in the cycles of life, despite my desire for pleasure like the next person.
Negative emotions, violent emotions, are pure life-force. I'd rather that than wake up one day and realize I've lived my whole life trying to please or pacify others, when what pleases them makes me miserable and inauthentic. Fire burns us, but it is essential to all of our inner processes, including digestion. It carries within it the power to transform. So, we can rest assured that it is a part of us.
Fire, or anger, can also be destructive. Anger scares people, yet is healthy. It can be a light for us; it can show us where we need to pay special attention.
These days, I am well, despite the vicissitudes of life and the fact that I have been burned. I feel like I am returning to life, maybe reawakening, as though I am moving out of a cycle of darkness, like a long waking up, stretching, and yawning. I don't think we have to be angry to wake up. I don't think we have to move into the extremes to be alive. Instead, I feel like there should be a certain kind of movement within; and if not anger, then sensitivity and acute awareness to reality, life, truth, and the conditions of others and in which we live.
What I am moving against is the deadening of our ability to feel slighted, to feel outraged, to feel affected by injustice. Healthy acceptance isn't indifference or powerlessness. Healthy acceptance is dealing with the emotions that accompany our impermanence and the experience of multifarious injustices. It's letting those powerful emotions move through us, unimpeded. We merely watch them.
But, that takes awareness and sensitivity and the intention to do so. Often, I have failed to address a slight. I have forgiven an unlimited amount of times, not knowing how to erect and guard my own boundaries. And though I know people sometimes commit slights unintentionally, I am trying to learn to react in a balanced manner. As of late, I am more intolerant of slights and people's mistakes, even if done so unintentionally. I forgive, yet I do not afford them the opportunity to do it again. I am full of knee-jerk reactions, yet also have the mind to follow up.
Once is enough; twice is too much. The thing is, I'm guilty of letting others commit the same offenses multiple times before my bill is due and I come to collect. I suppose I've reached my quotient of asshole offenses and thoughtlessness; I suppose this is the nature of the parabola. Now, I'm trying to regain my equilibrium. I know I cannot hold people to the standards I would hold a significant other; however, I don't think that's the issue. In fact, I think the problem is that I trust too easily and give away my affection at will. I haven't learned to discern between those who are deserving and those who are not. I haven't learned to trust when it is a natural consequence of time and experience.
It feels petty to me to have to look at people with a discriminating eye and with suspicion. Aren't all people good? At heart? Maybe Western and Eastern ideas are clashing within me. The idea of "evil" is not quite gelling well. Is there such thing in the modern and Western sense? Or is evil truly just ignorance? Or is it both?
Maybe it's both. Maybe there is such thing as evil, and it begins as the seed of ignorance and exists because of the cloak of ignorance veiling the truth. Maybe under this cloak, we are able to commit horrific, and lesser, crimes against humanity. I know that most times I commit a slight, it is because I am not aware of the affect it has on the other person. On the other hand, there are those who commit great evils, knowingly. I understand, from a Buddhist perspective, that good and bad really are just reflections of the One, of pure awareness, but one side is limited.
What I've established is that we are limited in our rational awareness. We fail to see all sides. This makes me feel like our little consciousness is operating through the sight of a pinhole. This is not so comforting. A Buddhist would say that no one can really hurt us; it is only what we perceive, and our mind is the creator. That our experience is truly subjective. I get that. But, discovering certain ideas, or even truths, pushes one to assimilate these ideas into one's worldview for some kind of continuity. In that respect, we then seek some kind of operation manual, as if operating a fighter jet. If "A" happens, then "B." As creatures of habit, we desire a manual. Is there such thing? (Perhaps, this is where the concept of a "paradigm" comes in.)
"Ahhh. OK. She did this. Now, how should I react?" Some of our reactions are habitual, knee-jerk reactions, and some of them come from our decision to act one way or another. Our power lies in our choice, and our habits rob us of our ability to choose. So, this all seems truly subjective, which lends itself to relativism, and which is hard for me to swallow. Something can be and not be. Absolutes or no absolutes. It IS wrong to murder, but we decide when it is "right" or "convenient" to uphold that absolute. In a time of war, it is merely "killing," and killing is not "wrong." Or is it?
A change of pace. What we seek, or what I am seeking, is peace in relation to life, but that is not always possible. Some people just don't get along, and some circumstances just aren't suitable. So that leads us to what is most natural to us.
We seem to be hardwired in some ways and not in others. If it were possible with current technology, could we upload, as in software, certain traits or habits or beliefs? Could we upload false memories which, in turn, would create specific conditions and reactions within a person? How in control are we? Are we held prisoner by our impulses, beliefs, and tendencies? Are we held prisoner by our memories and inheritances? Or is this a natural adaptation or defense mechanism, thanks to our lower animal selves?
Maybe the concepts in "The Matrix" aren't so far out? I'm saying that all this "reality" seems to be make-believe or a child's plaything. That reality isn't as objective as we'd like to believe. That there is apparent chaos in the infinite and finite order of things.
Our inner processes and the processes that underlie all of life are ordered and organized; yet, this seems to produce a chaos. Or the issue is that we aren't able to perceive orders of that level, a level that supersedes all current mental faculties.
Or it could be nothing, and all could be random, if you so choose to believe. However, just because you believe something doesn't make it true, in reality--such things like delusions exist. This means to me that there is evidence of something objective in the world, such as "laws of the universe." Maybe the thing that creates all this complexity really boils down to one simplicity: energy and the fact that energy has an infinite attribute: It cannot be created or destroyed. It is infinite in scope and eternal and operates according to certain fixed laws. (And do these laws operate by habit, as we often do, and as Rupert Sheldrake asserts in his theory on "morphic resonance.")
So like fireworks, we start out from one point and burst forth on to the screen. Now just magnify that fireworks show across the universe, and we can see how great the potential is for everything. One of the most curious and interesting things is how something could be so simple, yet so complex because that is its nature.
Talk about stretching the mind.
Maybe whatever choices I make really only reflect slivers of the whole, and I'm necessarily trying to get all I can out of what carries an infinite amount of potential. I have felt "this" and "that" and have been most uncomfortable and comfortable, and I want to understand what it is like exactly as this being, in this body, to add to the pages and pages of other lives and their experiences. (And for what? That question is an end in itself because life is happening not for a particular end, as a means to an end, but is an end in itself.)
I've already lived and died in this flash, in this moment of time. So, I'm not sure what's to fear, except that it's human nature to fear, and that I am not above being ordinarily human.
I am a stranger in a strange land, and all this around me, including you, is also me. I am living in multiple worlds at once. And maybe I'm discovering that equilibrium and am fostering relationships that don't reflect incompatibility and false intimacy.
Now what? I'll take this and live as genuinely as I can and experience as much humanity as possible. I will do the thing I do best: remain mystified but always forward-moving.
