In my many varied explorations and practices I have come across a popular idea, which, for obvious reasons, seems very appealing to many people who seek to comfort themselves in our world of great insecurities and psychological pressures.
The idea states roughly the following: “You don’t have to worry about anything. You don’t have to seek the “red pill”. Things always go the way they are meant to be. The world is your friend and it takes good care of you.”
Wow. Positive thinking rules, doesn’t it? And at times it does miracles to those of us in need of some reassurance or a gentle push forward (as opposed to a rough and provocative “get your shit together and get back up you whining idiot!”). Moreover, there are cases where positive thinking has helped cure supposedly fatal diseases!
But I must argue that the CULT of “positive thinking” combined with fatalism can be just as destructive as any dogmatic religion.
Why is that? Because the world we inhabit is beautiful and full of wonders, BUT it’s merciless and predatory as well, and some predatory creatures and systems could care less about “love and light” one manifests.
It would be like trying to use the Bible as a shield against an army of agents Smiths or a bunch of Termintor machines. To my great displeasure, we don’t live in the world of elves and werewolves, my spiritual friends (although who knows, maybe they are still around?). We live in a technological, industrial world of codes, wires, corporate entities and cold, soulless processes that rule not just our financial system, politics, and even school and medical systems, but our minds and bodies as well (and if you wonder how, come back for my future posts as it’s a separate big topic to discuss).
Do you really think the universe “takes care of you?” Yes, it does, but ask yourselves this: who benefits from this care, and who really needs it?
A farmer, too, takes care of his meat cows. Even we - the consumers - find them cute when we pass by the fields. The farmer feeds them well, he makes sure they are warm and healthy - and then they are slaughtered. In Japan they go as far as giving some cows regular massages to make their meat have special layers of fat and muscle fibers for an extra sophisticated taste! Some cows are used as milk cows first, milked for many years with the help of specialized equipment. Those metal sucking machines attached to the udder... I can only imagine the physical experience that’s taken beyond anything nature designed the udder for. If you are a woman who has breastfed, you’ll probably be able to imagine it much more clearly... Take away the baby, attach cold metal suckers... and it’s not a twisted bdsm fantasy you can stop anytime you want, but a real, merciless day-to-day existence.
Does an imprisoned cow know any other life? I think she must sense something is not quite as it’s supposed to be... But she has gotten used to it.
Now look at this - bacteria, fungi, and parasites that inhabit human bodies could care less about love, positivity, kindness, and things like “morals” and “ethics”. PEOPLE care about these things, people crave them or rely on them to keep the society functioning in a relatively safe mode of existence... But some other organisms and structures clearly aren’t concerned with these social and spiritual niceties. They just need to survive, and for them - everything goes.
How can one ignore the fact that the world is full of entities which are not affected by passive acts and projections of “love and light” so many spiritual people rely on? You can meditate for peace and love till you pass out of tiredness or hunger and then consider yourself a great hero and a worker of light...
Still, a rapist will continue looking for his new victim, a crooked politician - focusing on getting more power, and flu virus - mutating and creating new interesting strains that might kill thousands of babies and the elderly.
The system of control is as far from our spiritual understanding of “good” and “pure” as a computer program that functions to fulfill a specific practical task; moreover, it can be set up to operate these same values (“good”, “pure”) with the sole purpose of the said control.
We see them as spiritual qualities. The machine sees them as instruments it can use to control a bunch of creatures that consider them important.
Here is one dumb, obvious example using the film most of the readers must have seen at least once. Would it make any sense to use things such as ethics, politeness, kindness, love, and acceptance toward Skynet from “Terminator” - a self-aware system, which, just like the mind of a psychopath, lacks the necessary brain functions to feel empathy, love, and compassion? In our human expression, it spits on your “light”.
The beautiful world of endless possibilities is full of factors that cannot be fixed by soft, polite attitude to them. It’s like you can’t persuade necrotic fasciitis to kindly leave the body of its victim, can you?)) The human body overtaken by it will be eaten by the destructive bacteria from the inside in mere hours.
While soft and all-accepting “spiritual seekers” keep being soft and all-accepting, the world they live in keeps its neverending hard-on... and guess who bends over to submit to its pressure so often disguised as unavoidable, must-be-accepted destiny, or even universal love?
Yes, the world takes care of us and our children, and it is beautiful, AND - it’s also many other things... And why do we choose to perceive only those of them that fit right into our worldview - as if someone else has predestined them for us so we don’t panic after encountering the first one or two that DON’T - and start asking too many questions?
I don’t have a plan or a solution for us all, and I do believe that love and kindness are among those elements that keep this whole thing called Life running... But I also offer to try looking beyond the obvious of that which brings relaxation and comfort to our minds.
Many spiritual paths praise relaxation and “letting go”. I myself practice stopping my inner dialogue and consider it to be one of the important keys to get to know the reality. But I also think that we, humans, need to learn to think very differently, to think SO hard that our heads would hurt.
No, not to think hard to get more work stress, money stress, or relationship stress (all that crap is clearly a part of the system we all live in)... I am talking about thinking as hard as the dumb cow raised in a cage would have to think to realize that she wasn’t designed to stay in that cage and be milked by mechanical suckers.
Stressing about work, relationships, career, etc., is like stressing about what your next-door cows are doing while being milked. It’s not hard - it’s dumb, it’s inside the cage, it’s inside the barn... it’s under the eye of a farmer who pushes the button and collects the cream.
Different thinking... hard, uncomfortable thinking... goes a little bit beyond all that. That “beyond” is most likely to be very uncomfortable - much less comfortable than any passive and relaxing meditation, but its effects might surprise those who dare take the challenge.
Live hard. Think hard. Be well, friends.
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