Below the Surface

12/23/23

Now that you know what I really think. Actually, no one has ever accused me of holding back. To some, this is a flaw or a sign of inner strength, maybe both. With age comes pulling one’s punches. I used to just come out with stuff, but now I slowly walk and point out the way. In the piece “Snakes Don’t Change They Only Shed Their Skin,” I drew a direct line between climate change and the disintegration of our institutions and Christo-fascist madness I mentioned energy, our spiritual energy, creates reality. This means belief, worship, and prayers create reality. The reverse is true: our stories shape our thoughts and what we believe possible. I’m not the first to say this. It is an ancient observation made by mystics, shamans, and magicians worldwide. It is the nut of the esoteric traditions borrowed and repackaged by New Age gurus.

Everything humans create starts first in the imagination before it becomes reality. Someone thought up money, buildings, farming, the printing press, film, TV, novels, Christmas trees, painting, sculpture, and religion. Everything in our world is populated by our imagination or someone else’s. We live in a prison of ideas and don’t even realize it. Culture is a giant bee hive. We buy into things all the time without a thought. This very thing has led us to the precipice of self-destruction. From the invention of the wheel and the use of fire to the atomic bomb, all comes from the imagination first.

We live our lives in our minds. We tell ourselves stories about who we are and our purpose. We have religious systems that give us more stories to live up to, confine, and control us. We bind ourselves together through collective imagination. We are engaging in a world of our imagining.

Ironically, our lack of imagination or discernment often holds us back from seeing the mess we’ve created with all of the toys and stories we’ve built.

How can we win?

We have entrapped ourselves in a nearly invisible prison of stories we tell ourselves. We take for granted all the layers of story that create inference and cogency in our daily lives and interpretations of each other.

If you or I were dropped into the Roman culture in 1 AD - it wouldn’t just be the language we would have trouble understanding; it would be the references, the nuisances, the morality, the assumptions about the meaning of life, and the nature of the universe. It would be people's relationship with their environment and each other. It would have more in common with a trip to Mars than what we believe the past to be.

All of these stories shape our minds, our way of seeing the world, our understanding of our purpose, and how we see each other. Stories built on other stories are history. History is fused with identity. Identity is often taken for granted and fused with our values, motivation, and actions. These influences and stories begin casting their spell on us before we have words as our personalities and values form. They are so intertwined that we often can’t tell where our values start and our consciousness ends. This is one reason meditation is imperative to enlightenment.

We must identify the consciousness outside all the layers of identity we hide, of course, in. We are, of course, more than all of these things. In fact, we are each a divine spark of creator embedded in monkey flesh. That monkey flesh comes with its limitations. The structure of our physical brain and the chemicals that run through it can inhibit or dis-inhibit our ability to transcend the trappings of all the stories and identities.

One can easily see how a culture - a shared collective of humans enmeshed in a particular cultural narrative - can be manipulated to do horrible things. Things that an outsider could see as immoral, viscous, insane, cruel, and/or stupid. Our collective mind has been filled with conspiracy theories, distrust in institutions, worship of wealth, and fantasies about an individual’s worth being represented only as their bank account. We have a culture of blaming the victims of violence, poverty, and even health. We blame people who get diabetes for being fat. (I knew a woman who blamed her mother for getting cancer because her mom took a ubiquitous drug during pregnancy. This woman had to blame someone and couldn’t accept the fact that if there were victims of her cancer, her mother was also one of them. No person takes drugs while pregnant that they think will cause their future child’s cancer. )

We live in a culture of “rugged individualism,” where people are supposed to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps,” and when they are born with no access to bootstraps, these people are being blamed or ignored. There are fantasies in the New Age of a “New Earth.” A Utopian place where it is heaven on earth in“5D.” A place where no one dies. It sounds a lot like the post-apocalyptic earth of the bible after god judges everyone and brings everyone back to life, and we have eternal life on earth.

Let me just put in a good word for death here. Death is part of life. There’s a reason for it. Physical immortality would be like getting stuck in a video game and playing the same character for eternity. How much could you learn? How much could you evolve or grow if you were stuck in the same meat box for eternity? It’s a frickin’ nightmare! Death gives us an escape to reconfigure ourselves so that we may come back in a new package with new stories and identities to see and experience things from a different perspective.

Yes, there are difficult things about being mortal. We lose those we love. We grieve, and we have to shed our physical bodies. We have to learn to let go. But death is not a curse in the grand scheme but a gift. Only our attachment, fear of the unknown, and limited physical perspective generally make it feel otherwise.