I am convinced more than ever that we all need to turn off our TV sets. At the gym this old fart works out in, I get angry voices if I choose not to watch ESPN; after all, sports are the thing in a gymnasium, not news. I have to courteously ask if I can put on CNN instead of Fox News(?). Glen Beck rules. The dumbing down and deadening of the American populous is a done deed. As I watch snippets of Palin being interviewed from the right and left, I catch her holding her special needs child (what jargon we use) in one arm and not closely at that, as if he were a thing. Her body language reveals a sleek bullet of low caliber, the arrogance that if she can run Alaska she can negotiate with the Iranian leadership. Hubris leaks from her like diaper crap. The women I speak with view her as an embarrassment, a gender anomaly. Her husband, the Alaskan sphinx, stands ready, harpoon in hand. She pushes a book that she did not write but in the world of Oprah this is of no issue. Palin is the physical grease that makes this country a laughingstock. I believe she really is the best we can offer — I see a Palin/Beck ticket down the line for the yahoos of this nation. I must say we have become very shabby as a country.
Krishnamurti in several places in several lectures over his years of teaching made it very clear that all societies are essentially corrupt. It is one of my abiding principles when I look about me and about the world. How does one stay morally clean and principled when society is brown shoe polish, the color of shit? How does one endure in a society that has seen the failure of capitalism? Isms are the bane of civilizations throughout the millenia. When and if a person deconditions himself of beliefs, institutions, parental injunctions, of unconscious and conscious shackles, of moribund religions in which celibacy is a value, with jihads and fatwas as threats rooted in religious violence, then, perhaps, one may become free. And if you do become free the existential threat to self is monumental, truly a stranger in a strange land. As best as I can say it, the free man or woman is in a state of continual insurrection. (I find that terrific.) No where in the public school system of this country are we taught to question authority or how to go about deconditioning one self. After all, teachers are bureaucratic dullards and slaves. For many of us we come to our deaths as rigid and stone-frozen as the giant statues of Easter Island.
When I worked with clients, I struggled to have them see. It takes balls rubbed in grit and baked in the deserts of the Southwest to divest oneself of the shellac this culture lays on us with giant rollers. I really believe, deeply so, that the greatest gift you can give children or clients is to assist them to see, to realize they have been steamrolled over, that they will live lives of deflated balloons unless there is an awakening of intelligence. I pose a question to you: if you have seen or if you are willing to see Citizen Kane, answer this question: — What is your rosebud? Begin here.
Too hard. OK. When was the last time you markedly, significantly changed an aspect of your character or personality?
And why are you most often an amalgam of the thoughts and ideas of all your teachers, spouses, colleges, bosses, politicians, and especially religious “leaders”? By the by, what makes you think you need a leader of any kind? Why do you need a church to expedite your prayers ritualistically to God? And why in the world do you need a God unless you are shaky and need the belief that there is an after life? Oh, I see, if I am good in this life which I will piss away being a conditioned slob and slave, I will have pomagrantes and whores in the next one. And have you ever examined, moment to moment, why you resist a new idea or a new way, that is, what idols of the mind step in front and ward off these changes? Why do you believe in anything? What makes you think that beliefs improve you, make you better, improve your lot? Beliefs only provide security, and brother, you should go into that and examine why you need such security to begin with.
I think a lot — excuuuuse me. I suppose, as I have been labeled, that I am a seeker. Well, that is a load of shit to begin with. I can seek inside a hall pantry closet. I deserve a sharp answer, I don’t know you so that is a non issue. I speak to myself when I write. You are welcome to grab hold of the kite’s tail. I seek to end my life, rather, I seek to understand my life, moment to moment, not with a method or some how-to or ism. I am free of that malarkey, many will never be. I used to remind clients that their task after treatment was over was to first be free of me because whether or not they realized it, I had used methods to assist them in an imperfect world to decondition themselves. And part of that freedom was to be rid of me. To be a disciple of anything sucks — look at Jesus’ crippled twelve.
For me an epiphany would be to see what is, reality, moment to moment, to die to the past and die to the future, to be here now as Eastern thought describes it. I have had glimmers of the promised land. I may never enter, but I know pollution when I see it. And Palin is the very worst kind, unawakened, narcissistic, ignorant, and stupid; for her heaven and hell is the good and plenty of life. It is beyond sadness.
Leave a Reply