WHAT ARE YOU?

WHAT ARE YOU?

Our lives, yours and mine, both began with a wordless question already formed. I don't remember it and neither will you because we didn't have vocabulary then. But we existed, nevertheless, in the question “What am I?” A second question soon slid alongside it, namely “What is my place in the midst of all this?”

Shortly after we were born, we began to be able to look around and focus our eyes on things, and faces that hove into view. The question we were coming from, remember, was “What am I?” So everything that captured our attention got labelled by our budding mind as an answer -- “Me. That's Me. And this is Me. And so is that". So, unconsciously, we began putting together a self-image.

The labeling became an ingrained habit. Psychologists call the habitual process “identifying”. We don't think it; the habit thinks us. Everything we see, hear, taste, smell and touch we robotically assume “That's me; I am that”. We still do it. And like everything else the mind latches onto, it insists on being right about it.

The mind is abetted by a Ruthless Rule of Reality which goes something like this – “Everything you add after 'I am', you become.” It's how you and I create our worlds. It's part of the rules of the game called Being Human. We create the world we live in by whatever we add after "I am...."

The cosmic joke is that it's all jiggery-pokery. We've imagined the whole thing, and our minds cannot tell the difference between something we've imagined and something that has actually happened. Anything imagined sets in train a string of biological and psychological consequences absolutely identical to those that would occur if what we've imagined has actually happened. We act as if what we're thinking and, consequently, feeling is real. But it's not. It's an illusion. 

But it does make for one helluva game. Human life is an improvisation in which we identify with characteristics, traits, attitudes, moods, ideas, concepts and beliefs. We say unto our selves “That's me”, adopt the “character” and then explore the situations life throws at us from that perspective, and generate the consequences of those assumptions. And we do all this as if it's all real and as if our lives depend upon it. In fact, it feels real because we've not been able until now to realise it's not real. We've assumed all along our cherished ideas about life and our selves in it are real, we're imagining it's real, and we spend a lot of energy proving that what we've created is real and true. We've not been able to remember, of course, that we once existed in a simple state of “I am” (with no additives). We've been inventing and pretending ever since.

Is that so bad? A hearty game of “Let's Pretend” makes for great theatrical entertainment. With everyone else playing the same game, it's like a cosmic Theatre Sports in which we are all our own participants, scriptwriters, directors, audience and critics. It's a really engrossing way to pass time.

But it is an illusion, and was never meant to be taken seriously forever. Only until now. Now it's time to wake up and grow up. Every assumption we ever made about “That's me” was, and still is, a mistake. We are not really who or what we think we are, and neither is any one else.

But if that's true, then What Am I? Who are you?

Until you're prepared to sit in the shade, sit down and contemplate the awful prospect that you might have made a basic mis-take, and that your ideas about who and what you are are erroneous.

Don't beat yourself up about it. We're all in the same learning game which dictates that we first have to experience what is NOT before we can come to a deep realisation of what IS. We get lost so that we can find. That way we get the wisdom of seeing things from different perspectives. Isn't that good news? If it isn't, stay in the illusion and keep going. But if you're ready to wake up, consider this ---

Identifying is the only cause of suffering.

Really?

Well don't take my word for it. Look for yourself into something that's causing you bother right now. Look underneath that and you'll find, maybe a negative belief you have about yourself that's keeping you stuck to the spot, maybe an idea about the way things should be that doesn't fit with what is, or maybe some other perception you've latched onto that you're sure is “right”, but is turning out to be a stone in your shoe.

Identity is the only cause of suffering? Well, if life isn't working for you in some way or other, you could choose to hear this as the best news ever! Maybe you've gone along blaming everything and everyone other than yourself for your “failures”? Not much juice is available down that hole. If it were true and the world had to change so that you could be happy, you're chances don't look too good. Perhaps you've looked everywhere else for the cause of your perturbation, but you still haven't managed to dig out the secret saboteur within. If so, what have you got to lose by trying a line of inquiry you haven't tried before? What's something I'm attached to that could be causing me to stew? Can I now let go of my investments in it? Phew!! Just think, if you've got this far not knowing what you are and therefore not able to be yourself, imagine what you could do once you find the actual truth after “I am …....”

One final hint. Because your mind, like mine, is absolutely attached to being right about its old conclusions, you may have to be very persistent in letting its immediate and familiar “reasons” fly through to the keeper and quietly insist on trekking this new line of inward-vestigation. Your mind will protest and may even go a bit nuts. Pay no attention. The “A-hah!” realisations will come.

EUREKA Mk.2.

EUREKA Mk.2?

The never-ending pattern of worldwide civil strife seems to have evolved somewhat over the past sixty years. Today, few civil wars involve pitched battles from trenches along neat geographic front lines – not in this part of the world, anyway. But civil war is still bubbling away in this country beneath a very thin crust of political correctness, and behind a flimsy veil of manufactured distractions, erudite politeness, and outright denial – and those ion power would not have it any other way – “Let's keep 'em nervous and uptight, and that way we've always got 'em where we want 'em.”

On the global scale there is still a steady stream of traditional large-scale attacks, both threatened and actual, by armed forces that far too often produce civilian casualties (“unavoidable collateral damage”). The impotent victims of such indiscriminate slaughter are festering into hotbeds of large-scale displacement and resentment that, unsurprisingly, lead to acts of guerilla-style violence against the perceived authors of the tyranny. The world is being stuffed with a growing mass of very pissed-off people.

An emerging trend in the reactions of this growing class of desperate victims are low-intensity conflicts with episodic violence in constantly moving locales. Again, the objects of such attacks tend to be civilian, and the aim of the perpetrators would seem to be to spread and multiply the hurt, the fear and terrors that they themselves may have suffered at the hands of their tormentors. This is tit-for-tat stuff on a serious scale. Just like the large-scale violence of historical civil war, these more localised guerilla-style “atrocities” include a rejection by the attackers of traditional political authority, a strong desire for payback and require sophisticated military-style intelligence and policing forces to deal with them, and a huge public relations machine to convince us that selling out our freedoms and responsibilities is “for our own safety”. The tragedy is that, ultimately, even proactive policing won't work.

Five conditions already exist in Australia that support a prediction of impending breakout of civil war:

• entrenched national polarisation, with no obvious meeting place for resolution;
• increasingly divisive press coverage and information flows;
• weakened, incompetently led and ineffective institutions, notably parliament and the judiciary;
• a denial of culpability and a sellout or abandonment of responsibility by political leadership;
• and the legitimisation of division and violence as the “in” way to either conduct discourse or solve disputes.

One saving grace for Australia, as I see it, when we compare our present situation to other countries, especially the USA, is that we don't have a large percentage of the population toting guns. But the pressure for that to change rears its ugly head with increasing frequency. For example, Senator David Leyonhjelm is such a shithouse shot he vigorously campaigned recently for trapshooting guns to have bigger magazines, and that “certain citizens” should be allowed to arm themselves for self defence. And he nearly won, in exchange for his support for the LNP government on other issues. The embargo on the unfettered importation of assault weapons into this country is within a catswhisker of being lifted.

Another thing that perturbs me is that, while the emotive rhetoric popularly calls for those not born here to adopt “the Australian way of life” and kowtow to our “values”, no-one seems to have anything like a clear idea of what Australian “values” actually are, how to articulate them, or how to get consensus on them. It seems to me, for example, that between people with different levels of education, between city- and country-dwellers, between those of differing religious affiliations, between gays and straights, and between those from different cultures, any common ground is couched in terms that mean very different things to different people – eg “a fair go” to a stockbroker from Pt. Piper means something very different to someone on a carer's pension from the western suburbs. And outside the cosy Sunday-morning ramblings of academic farts over their smashed avocado and skinny lattes, no-one seems to find this high on an agenda of national importance. There's an arrogant, ignorant, pervading assumption that Australian values are "my" values.

It's far too easy to drape oneself in a flag and turn up to some hideously overblown “celebration” organised at obscene expense by some events organisation paid for by “the taxpayer”, and stand around feeling goosebumps while someone famous sings a national anthem that very few of us know all the words to.

We don't even bother to work out who or what our “enemies” really are. We just go along to get along. We do know that we don't have any leadership that seems to have a vision and know what it's doing, and we're getting a bit nervous, but we shrug it off with “What can I do?” – a rhetorical question to which no-one seriously wants an answer. That would require effort.

For some of us in this “lucky” country, the very people whom we've “elected” to look after our interests are actually our enemies. We're anxious over deepening social, educational and economic schisms and conflicts that won't declare themselves, and we just don't know what to do about it. Our politicians are too busy protecting those in their particular “club”, and chasing short-term “wins” against each other to take a longer view of where all their scrapping taking us. They're too busy serving the party that endorsed them and paying no attention whatever to the people who actually elected them.

When I look at the current state of the political parties as an indicator of Australia's health, I despair at the level of ineptitude, and self-serving arrogance that pervades their every communication with the electors. In the name of “keeping Australians safe” they refuse to submit to any examination of their performances, hide much of their their activities from public gaze, and don't seem to care, except for a short period of “let's pretend” around election time, that they no longer have the confidence of the hoi-polloi.

We now have demonstrably weakened institutions and parties that are not only polarised, but actively risking and even promoting disintegration. Follow that line, and the currently isolated incidents of rage, resentment, impotence and frustration could erupt into open war on the streets. Yet their focus remains on keeping us alert but not alarmed and catching malcontents in the act of venting their rage, without giving more than a moment's thought to dealing with the root causes of festering insurrection.

There's a huge repositioning of personal values going on now, in contexts that are increasingly unstable. We no longer know who we are, or where we are in this mess. We find it increasingly difficult to find ourselves and our place in the chaos. And no-one seems to even care about providing some vision or guidance. We're suffering from a tsunami in identity crisis, and polarising splits along economic, social, cultural and religious lines.

Part of the problem , as I see it, is that we've had it good for so long that we've lulled ourselves into a zone of relative comfort, and now find we're lost without any intelligent and effective leaders, and we are poorly equipped personally to hew our own path because we sold out on our responsibilities to the very people who now can't even run a cake stall, let alone a country.

We know we are at risk of civil war, or something like it, when an election, an enactment, an event, an action by government or people in high places, becomes utterly unacceptable to a party, a large group, a significant constituency, and we haven't a clue what to do about it. After decades of inaction we've paralysed ourselves. We've put our faith in pygmies, enlarged to falsely gigantic proportions by yellow journalism and our own reluctance to look askance at the pompous pulp we're being fed.

It's our fault, and our responsibility. We let them get away with it, and left others to do the criticising and heavy lifting. Now we're sliding into a mess resulting from our own neglect of the responsibilities of freedom and citizenship.

If parliaments alone were ever the whole answer (and I doubt that), they certainly are no longer. Parliaments, both state and federal have been allowed to become utterly dysfunctional and bought/controlled by men who've spent decades distracting and dividing us in order to keep control. And we no longer have a judicial system to come to our aid, because it’s been so politicised.

It is indicative of just how sick the situation has got when George Brandis' outrage at Pauline Hanson's burqua stunt last week got no support whatsoever from the President of the Senate or anyone on his side of the House. They sat there with their hands in their laps. So much for “government”. They've sold us out.

But it's not their fault. We put them there, and leave them unsupervised.

Neither you nor I have any exemption from the ordinary fate of humankind. If we relinquish our engagement with governance (and we have) we must suffer the consequences of our neglect, like the historical Empires that are tottering and the Nations that have perished.

We're going to have to take power back unto ourselves. But, for a while at least, some people are going to try to do it by grouping together in their resentment of a common “enemy”, hitting the streets and venting their rage. It won't work, of course, but that won't stop the hotheads from having a go. When they do, my suggestion is to be somewhere else.

My main hope is in strong gravitational forces above all this that counteract what we’re seeing today. I also see strong evolutionary forces in play. But, like all evolution that has been taken down a blind alley, things will probably get far worse before they get better.

What to do about it? Well, first and foremost, that's up to me to reclaim the authorship of my life, isn't it?

And you?

FREEDOM

The smallest prison in the universe is the secure, self-righteous cell of our own comfort zone. There is respite, of a sort, but no satisfaction or growth from a challenge well met, a lesson well learned, or a new level of awareness attained. In short, none of what we came here for. 

There is a world of difference between being free, and merely feeling not-bothered. We came from freedom, in freedom. But we could not know it, any more than a fish can "know" the water it showed up in. We came here, free to experience being not-free, free to lose our way,and experience not-freedom, so that we can work our way through to rediscover the joy of natural, contented being-ness -- and know it for the first time.

Free is what we are at our deepest core. We tap into that realm when we commit to engaging with the entirety of life -- not just dabbling with the bits we feel comfortable with.

Comfort and Satisfaction are not synonyms -- far from it.