Dissolution is everywhere. We easily tear down,
minimize, shame, or dismiss others. It takes too much energy to absorb,
include, integrate, and assimilate. Rather, we expunge, cauterize, and ignore.
Knee jerk reactions can even incite us to violence. We can swear at, mock, and
vilify those who are different from ourselves. Our impatience, perceptions, and
cultural appropriations set us up for non-acceptance of that which does not
suit our status quo. And such negative judgmentalism is endemic to every
culture, to every group, subgroup, and clique. Worse even, it is harbored in
the individual. We walk around with the censorship deep in our psyche, anchored
in our adopted values, and yet too often can unleash it on the tip of our
tongues: “Disgusting. Idiot. Shame on you! Buttocks’ hole! Fool. Lowlife. You’re
a bastard.” And worse: “Retard!”
Thing is, too often, the very subtlety of it all
can disguise it. Our own self-righteousness can feel laudable. “It’s beneath
me. She wears dreadful colours. I hate people who do this, or do that!”
All our lives we get taught by others what to
think. And we even take on other’s feelings too. A child learns fear responses,
learns racism, easily adopts a sense of hate. Taking on the sense of self, a
child begins a journey fraught with the acculturation of ages, tradition,
expectation, and of maturation toward a plateau of regular and steady
personality and character; it is a stance from which one may ineluctably choose
not much further to grow; yet for some it is a conscious choice. Such are the
pathways for most of us. We evolve rather slowly along the continuum of
enlightenment as we adopt the main behaviors and sensibilities of our ‘being’,
as opposed to our ‘becoming’. And being ‘just fine for who I am’ becomes our
happy place, or our main place, (or our being accustomed to accepting a Thoreauvian
sensibility of unrequited desperations.)
We eschew the imposition of being called out,
pigeonholed, labelled. Or perhaps not. Some of us are at ease with wearing
white capes and hoods, like living ghosts. Some of us are at ease with
brandishing swastikas, or badges and emblems and identifying slogans. We care
not that we are purposefully and utterly committed to what amounts to a
petri-dish of convention within the whole spectrum of mankind. We cling to the
sense of our culture, unable easily to ascend beyond it. At most we may
side-step the Venn Diagram of our birthright, or even of our particular
pathway, but we do tend readily to settle into another. We replace the Bible on
the shelf for the book of Tao, (but we do not necessarily read either, let
alone immerse ourselves in their preferential practices.) We are content to be
as we feel, rather than to understand, deeply, profoundly, entirely, what it is
that we are really, truly, being. And so, our prejudices mount. It is natural
to flock together with our own species. Different sports for different sorts. Different
cars for different drivers. Different houses. Different clothes. Collective,
acculturated thoughts. Yes, it can become natural to be divisive, exclusive, demeaning,
and self-serving. Differences become reference points to judgmentalism and prestige.
Thought drives us. Emotions can anchor us. It is
thinking about our thinking, (the perpetual practice of meta-cognition,) that
can invigorate our evolution through the multi-dimensional dynamics of
aspirations toward more and more enlightenment. Like compassion, it is a
journey, not just a product. We are too much of everything to be ‘perfect,’
entirely with consistency. As Bob Dylan puts it: “I contain multitudes”. At
issue is the choices we make, moment for moment, however caught up we are in
survival modes; familial anchors; competitive striving; the fundamentalism of
political stance or religious segregations; the inviolate dispensation of being
self-righteous; the inarguable need to level the playing field; or then the
dreadful insecurity of feeling fraught by one’s individual ineffectiveness;
until the paradigm shift of a generalized integration becomes ‘the new norm’,
such that one’s actions can begin to contribute more and more effectively
toward the health of the whole. Acceptance is all. Integration is everything.
And compassion continues in its dendrite-like veins of more and more
understanding. If ‘Everything’ is important, and ‘Nothing’ really matters, how
then to suspend negative judgements? How to accept, assimilate, absorb,
integrate, and nurture the edges of insight? Whatcha thinking? Hm?
