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A question I have long asked myself is what gave rise to this completely unnatural mental proclivity in humans best known as "ego". It's as though we were all programmed to miss the very point of life. Even the happiest and most successful of us. Sometimes I even think especially them, but, really, all of us suffer from it, convinced fully that, while we may not have been born with it, it develops naturally in an early childhood phase.
Michael Tsarion thinks it was born of cataclysm, that the survivors of a great planetary cataclysm formed it as a defense as a result of their trauma. Pretty hard to be generous and open and loving when survival has been thrown to such an apocalyptic ebb. Anyone who has had the misfortune to watch the 2009 Viggo Mortensen movie The Road, and I'm one of those, might have the vaguest notion of the kind of privation and barbarity involved in such a thing. Tsarion seems to think it is our cellular memory at fault, but I can see that it would easily have been parents inculcating it in their children to help them survive the dark times following such a massive disaster, that those who did not, found themselves with children unable to survive in that post-cataclysm world, and so in a very short time, this false face, this fake layer of thin air was worn by everyone, and those the best at embellishing it rose to the top of the heap. This would tend to cement it in humanity as a whole... because I just do not get the feeling from anybody that cataclysm is on their deep inner radar. More the obverse. They can't crane their brains around to catch a glimmer of it, no matter how existentially terrified they become.
Else, for certain, we'd have stood up by now.
If cataclysm were in our cells, we'd've smacked down the power elite, smacked them to the dirt, by now.
Still, there are people expert at maneuvering you by use of your ego. For certain personality types it's like taking candy from a baby, and, actually, the more immune from it you believe you are, the better job they've done on you... I pretty much figured this out by the time I was 30, but ended up giving it one more long burst of cosmic strength to make 100% sure. By the time I was 38, twenty years ago, I was living at a Zen temple, and NOTHING, not even that temple, could turn me from my task.
I know this Achilles Heel, which might better be thought of as an Achilles Face or an Achilles Body or an Achilles MIND, has held the day for at least 2500 years, maybe more, but I also know that it wasn't here 4000 and 5000 years ago. I think, really, the purpose of the Buddha and the masters who followed him was strictly to teach people to drop this impenetrable armor of thin air. It is NO protection and it fucks up EVERYTHING. So, with an ounce of understanding, and a drop of humility, one might easily muster the generosity to call them "bodhisattvas".
The literal translation of that term is "mind heroes".
I think Michael Tsarion is something of a mind hero, maniac that he is. He has devoted his life to finding out the nuances of how you have been and are manipulated by groups of filthy fascist insects, unable to free yourself from the suffering that attends even the most privileged life. The key is: You don't stop suffering, but you DO stop letting it do what it does to you.... You ARE doing it, this letting suffering ruin you. This must stop. We must do better ourselves and for our children. If we could quit programming it into them, we might be able to beat it for good and ever, but this will not EVER happen if we keep letting pigs push our buttons to sustain their vast estates, their planet-killing control.
Maybe we have established here that this is not "New Age", not a designer shirt we wear, another ego garment that makes us appear more loving and evolved, without requiring of us that we ACTUALLY do better. Nope. That's not what we're about. You can get that at almost any Zen temple or certainly there are thousands and thousands and thousands of outlets for it that will spring up at a touch of a Google search.
IT ISN'T NEW AGE.
IT ISN'T RELIGION.
It's the science of transcendence, the art of freedom, and maybe your only hope.
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