In this era of global meltdown, economic and otherwise, it is hard to find anything that one might hold onto.
Just give me one thing that I can hold onto,
To believe in this living is just a hard way to go.
Angel From Montgomery by John Prine
Do any of us ever really learn to live without illusions? It has been argued that our consensus reality is merely a shared hallucination.
We all learn to agree that we call this red and that a far distance. Our words become symbols of other things helping us to navigate the world and have a shared experience. Our enculturation weaves each of us into a specific part of the tapestry of humanity’s shared illusion where the symbols are so richly interwoven as to become consciousness itself. We think in symbols and the symbols become our reality.
This is not to say that all of these shared symbols are useless. They have evolved precisely because they are of use to us. But, like any tool, it’s important to be able to set it aside when it does not serve. It’s important to be able to get past some of the limitations of this symbolic thinking.
It’s important every now and then to strip off our blinders and take a good look around. It’s important to remind oneself which is the symbol and which is the reality to which the symbol refers, or as the Chinese might say, which is the moon and which is merely the finger pointing to it.
Confusing symbols for reality becomes a persistent problem whenever we endeavor to think anew. It limits us when we become tangled in a web of illusion, however useful those illusions might sometimes be.
That’s what Zen masters are talking about when they speak of awakening or attaining enlightenment. They are referring to the lifting of the veil of illusion that Robert Pirsig describes as the difference between riding in a climate controlled self-enclosed automobile and ripping through the wind on a motorcycle. On the one hand you are many steps removed from the external reality of the roaring wind and on the other you are plugged directly into it. We see reality through a screen comprised of our symbols. The screen reorders what it finds out there so that the data better suits us – for good or ill.
The Conventional Wisdom is the densest part of this web of illusion. If you find yourself caught in that part of the web you will be agreed with by many but will nevertheless be wrong about most things.
We’ve all been in harness for so long that it’s hard to think beyond the conventional wisdom, to set aside the illusion we are so invested in – but it’s important that we do so, especially as we arrive irrevocably at a major point of departure. We couldn’t continue to do things the way we always have in the past even if we wanted to. We are now forced to change – like it or not.
We have come to a time of do or die. We must now act. We can’t be swayed by old arguments or antiquated thinking. We can’t be distracted by dinosaurs of either party. We must move bravely and boldly into the emerging future – and as we all know it will be very different. The way in which it is different is largely up to us and how we adapt and respond to the challenge before us. We must be bold.
Don’t think we can’t do things very differently because we can, especially now that the old symbols are crumbling, the old illusions fading into the mist, the old way of thinking giving up its grip on our beating heart. We have every reason and every opportunity to challenge the conventional wisdom and to stand up for bold new thinking – thinking that just might help us to meet the challenge of global warming and all the rest.
It’s important to bear in mind the malleability of our shared illusions. We don’t have to be limited by the small thinking of the past. Because that’s the way things work in Washington, for example, should never again be the acceptable answer to any question. Not only can we dare to think big, we need to think big, and not just big but astronomically so.
We need to shed the notion that we are limited by our past, our nature or by any other thing within our grasp.
We don’t have to continue our inertial hurtling down the same doomed path of war and mindless planetary destruction.
We don’t have to let criminals rob us and then wipe their feet on us and say, ‘That’s the way it goes.’
We don’t have to do things the way we’ve always done them. We don’t have to let the old guard stay in charge.
We don’t have to let the bastards among us drive us to extinction.
We could stand up to Washington and say enough with this whitewash bullshit, we want justice. This could be our first step towards atonement.
If we so chose, we could transform our own culture, purge the corruption in our government, end organized warfare, make the United States of America live up to its promise and lead the world to a new era of peace, compassion, human rights and planetary stewardship.
But this is a choice we must make firmly and soon. More of the same will no longer do. If we let the criminals in Washington get away with their crimes it will be the end of us.
The only good thing to be said about the present moment is that it is one to be seized.
We can choose between love and madness.
I pray that we will do the right thing.