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I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Man’s;
I will not Reason and Compare: my business is to Create.
Each Man is in his Spectre’s power
Until the arrival of that hour,
When his Humanity awake,
And cast his Spectre into the Lake.
I give you the end of a golden string;
Only wind it into a ball,
It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate,
Built in Jerusalem’s wall.
I care not whether a man is Good or Evil; all that I care
Is whether he is a Wise man or a Fool. Go! put off Holiness,
And put on Intellect;
Through education systems, the media, our individual background, our cultural background, our social institutions, our parents and peers, we have been culturally conditioned into adopting a web of opinions through which we interpret reality. We only see what the web of our opinions allows us to see. It obscures the true nature of life like a veil, giving us the illusion that we know who we are and what life is all about.
It may be comfortable to live in the false security of this consensus pseudo-reality, as the majority do, but we pay a high price. We stop feeling really alive, and we believe that our filters are the only correct filters. We start believing in absolutes, instead of embracing the never-ending journey of reducing filters.
An example: Some non-human cultures can be very sophisticated. Wolves, for example, although beasts, can hunt and coordinate in packs through a very sophisticated emotional signal system. They share an intricate emotional worldspace.
Yet anything outside that world system is not registered. You could read the Bible to them, but no luck. What you are, with that book, is basically dinner plus a few bits that will have to be spat out.
The point is that we humans respond, and can respond, only to stimuli that fall within our worldspace, our worldview. Everything else is non-existent - often spat out and discarded.
Since no human can possibly gain all knowledge, our filters always discard information that would be useful/meaningful at a higher level of consciousness. Truly enlightened individuals understand that the removal of filters is an infinite task: the more filters that are removed, the more filters the individual becomes aware of.
This is the Conundrum of Enlightenment.
One first day about 1990 I brought a message to the Brevard (NC) Friends Meeting re greed. Those Brevard Quakers are among the best and brightest people I’ve known. However that message fell flat (I could tell!) After the meeting I asked the clerk (a former Methodist minister) if he didn’t think that for one man to be worth $50 B was obscene; he agreed; however I got the message that greed is not something Quakers talk about.
Plenty of talk about war; but never greed; but don’t people realize that greed is the most common cause of war?
Everyone knows the old saying about early Quakers: that they came to the New World to do good, and they did very well. That has been just as true of our country in the 20th Century. We’ve gone all over the world to do good, and we’ve done very well, so now we have extensive military installations in about 30 countries.
Like most people I was surprised and shocked at the violent objections of young people in Seattle to the meeting there of the WTO; it happened again a few years laters at Cancun. Recently I’ve learned a little about why that happened:
Our “farmers” (corporations), with the help of the taxpayer have produced many, many tons of cheap grain to export to the Third World, thereby pauperizing the native farmers.
An economic 9-11 occured recently at Cancun when China, India, Brazil and S.Africa got together to refuse WTO’s proposed exemptions of subsidies for American and European grain producers. In fact India itself exported 6 million tons of grain to hungrier nations (without subsidies).
I suppose doing good always leads to doing well, but doing well— for whom?
I know everyone hates war, but am I the only Quaker concerned about greed?
“It’s difficult for us to imagine, but our exceptionalism may not be permanent” (p.63 of Jeffrey Madrick’sThe End of Affluence).
The other day:
Walmart sales dropped.
The dollar fell off.
The Dow Jones fell ca 150 points.
Just a blip? or a harbinger of what lies ahead. Most of us will hope for the first, but an underlying anxiety remains.
We’ve been told over and over that our economy is consumer driven, but people must have money to consume. Have they been borrowing to spend? Are their credit cards maxing out? Sooner or later the bills have to be paid; ignore that and there will eventually be a rude awakening– a “hard landing”. What about no bottom?
Just don’t think about stuff like that; it isn’t pleasant! and we’re entitled to pleasure; aren’t we?
What’s true of the individual is equally true of the nation!! The debt mounts up day by day, year by year– until???
When we no longer have the means to consume Chinese goods, they may stop lending us money, and the interest rates will go sky high. Do you know what happens when the dollar is worth 10 cents, and a loaf of bread $10. Read about post war Germany; it wasn’t pleasant. It will never happen here, or will it?
Also read Isaiah; he understood these things. Times don’t really change very much.
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