Subtle Sensibilities

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?