Heaven Swan » Sat May 20, 2017 8:09 am wrote:Why can't we do both? Why one or the other?
Can't we engage in action for change and to build a better world while also changing ourselves by healing, practicing spirituality, learning, etc?
Can do both. But enlightenment first. I'll try to explain further why I think this. Remember, this is just me, everyone's least favorite ordinary house cat. I speak with no voice of authority, not representative of any social hierarchy, academic or otherwise. Only group I speak for is the one and only secret society of space aliens.
If we organize for affordable housing, it sounds like a good idea, but we end up living in shoeboxes. If we organize for free education, we get free indoctrination. Now, affordable shoeboxes are better than being financially underwater for life, and free indoctrination is better than paying for it, I guess, but it seems obvious to me that something needs to change on a more fundamental level.
Enlightenment first - to me - means seeing through the games we play. Having it fully sink in that we really aren't
getting anywhere. We're on a ball spiraling through space with no destination, time is just markers. Our little egos are here briefly, then gone.
"Getting somewhere" is one of the games we play. Building a better world is like a hobby. There's nothing wrong with playing games or having hobbies. When people have hobbies, they have fun with them. When people become
fans, then we have problems. They obsess over their hobbies. They bicker about who is the leader of the fanclub. They defend their team. There are football riots, and all that nonsense. People take their games and hobbies too seriously. When they're not enlightened, that is.
It may sound callous for me to say building a better world is just a hobby, since lives are on the line. I stand by my statement. Human beings play dangerous games sometimes.
If one is enlightened, one doesn't take their games as seriously. That doesn't mean one doesn't play to win, get competitive. It means there's a solid, fundamental foundation under the games and hobbies.
Besides seeing through our games, what is this solid, fundamental foundation of enlightenment. It's all one-on-one stuff. There's healing the sick, comforting the dying, and caring for the weak. These are enlightened priorities.
How do you heal the sick? Being healthy yourself, first of all. Like on the airplane, when the oxygen masks drop down, you put yours on first. You aren't helping anyone if you pass out. Healing the sick doesn't mean laying on the hands to shrink a tumor, it means uplifting people's spirits in a way that isn't selling them a cheap high. There are sick people everywhere in our society, emotionally, mentally, spiritually. Enlightened beings have their work cut out for them.
Comforting the dying. How can someone who is afraid of dying themselves do that? Comforting the dying is a specialty of enlightened beings. They know what to do and say. Maybe just be there. Maybe more. It's tough to explain. You've really got to die first yourself, to know what to do.
Caring for the weak. It doesn't mean what you'd expect. Weak is relative. The enlightened person is compassionate. That's strong. Caring is all about communication. And communication is only possible between equals. This is advanced class stuff.
Once upon a time, it was normal for people to take care of the dying, it was just something you do. It's become rarer these days. It would be nice if that became trendy again. Put the nursing homes out of business. Unenlightened people say, 'oh, but what about
my life, what about
me?' Enlightened people don't think like that.
I don't know if it's like this in other countries, but in America, being enlightened means being an advocate at the hospital, even at the doctors office. You have to fight to get humane care for people. Health care is big money business, corporations taking over every last corner. And you know what that means. This is what goes on underneath the 'healthcare debate' in the US. It's another case of more fundamental problems being ignored.
I was talking to a friend a few weeks ago, guy in his mid-seventies, about these health care supermarket-style things. The health care 'industry.' More like factories, not doctors offices. Just all the wrong impersonal things, all rolled into one. My friend nods, says, 'When it's my time, I hope I get hit by a bus.' He knows exactly what I'm talking about.
But if you're enlightened, it means fighting for people to be treated like human beings at these places. So those are the priorities.
But let's say you don't have any sick, dying or weak people around you at the moment. Besides all that, being enlightened means showing what it means to be enlightened, looking for ways to maybe expedite the process in others. This is what you do in your spare time, as well.
After all of that, there's hobbies like building a better world. I think I can best give a sense of what this means by talking about what I know. Video games. Bear with me, here. Not because it's going to all make sense at the end, but because I'm asking nicely.
I have a friend who is a surgeon. He also had the world record on donkey kong for a few years. He is a smart fellow, he's read the studies that show that playing video games help a surgeon's reflexes, hand/eye coordination. Other people read these studies and say, 'look! video games are good for you!' But we all know that to be a better surgeon, you have to actually
be a surgeon. Without a foundation, what is the point of having better reflexes and hand/eye coordination? They're only useful when applied.
The parallel I'm drawing is that the enlightened person is like a surgeon. They may play games, social, intellectual, or whatever. Maybe they play the build a better world game. They're not actually looking to achieve the goals of the game, though, they're doing it in service to the fundamental foundation. Working within the games, using them. Looking for more ways to expedite the process.
And hey, maybe they even help build a better world, without meaning to. My friend plays games to keep his reflexes sharp, and ended up holding the world record on donkey kong. It just wasn't the important thing. I mean, the guy is a surgeon. Would you care about video game world records if you were a surgeon?
I have another friend, a musician. He also happens to have world records on some well known games. He's another person with a balanced life, video games are just a hobby. But for him, the games are kind of like his spiritual practice. They're not really games to him, they're bio-feedback devices. It sounds silly, but he becomes one with the game. In the last forty years of video game history, I've only seen a few programmers, and no players approach the games like he does. And then he goes out and plays shows with his band, has a life. He's also a very positive, smart human being. A true uplifter of spirits.
Then I have a third friend, just a regular guy with a nine to five desk job. He also has world records on games, and is better than the surgeon and the musician are at the games in general. I mean this guy is scary good. People have offered him thousands of dollars to buy his lucky red baseball cap.
But he's just a regular guy, nothing weird about him if you met him outside of an arcade. When people ask him how he got so good at the games, he says, "You just get lucky." He's being modest. Most people will never even get to the place where you have an opportunity to 'get lucky.' This is what it's about for him. Seeing how lucky he can get.
Then there's me. I use my encyclopaedic knowledge of old games as metaphor. Parables and stuff. I could explain how the mechanics of the game Ghosts n' Goblins symbolizes the dance of enlightenment, but I won't do that here.
To be a better surgeon, to get into a zen-like state where the boundaries between self/other melt away, to create luck, to tell fun stories with lessons hidden inside. That's why we play games. Other people might take the games they play at face value. They're only looking on the surface. We're playing the same games, some of us just have different goals.
Anyway, I've rambled long enough for one post. One other thing I want to say though, is maybe navel-gazing isn't all bad. The way I see it, it could be a tactic, like stopping shopping. There's what, four hundred million Americans? Which means roughly a hundred, a hundred fifty million households. How many navel-gazers would it take to mess up the capitalist system. Fifty million? Capitalism has to grow, that's its nature. What happens when a big chunk of the consumers stop consuming. Inflation through the roof. Credit card aprs go to fifty, seventy five percent practically overnight. Would the system be able to sustain itself? For how long?
I'm not talking about people who do ten minutes of transcendental meditation a day. I mean enlightened people who are deliberately doing navel-gazing as a political act. These people are terrorists, sitting there doing
nothing. Not 'turning on, tuning in and dropping out.' Sitting down right where they are, in the middle of society. What is a wildcat strike, a hunger strike?
So those are some ordinary ideas, about what I think is the essential, yet missing ingredient.
Both his words and manner of speech seemed at first totally unfamiliar to me, and yet somehow they stirred memories - as an actor might be stirred by the forgotten lines of some role he had played far away and long ago.
