We are Whole, Yet We Live Divided. Why?
Wholeness. If you are reading this, take a moment and look around. All is connected. The wild is in you. Love is you. Wholeness is you. No matter where you live, you are it. Only our enculturated thought creates divisions, labels, and a perception built on symbols. Underneath thought, in the quiet, one sees that there are no divisions. There are no enemies. There is no duality. Everything flows together. All are included. All of us are here together, from the smallest atom to the largest galaxies.
Be still and listen. Thinking will never capture what is. Let your thoughts quiet on their own. Just be. In that deep quiet is when that wholeness that is without name, form, or time is there.
You are not your name. A name is a symbol. You are not where you came from. That place is not you. You are not what you have been taught or your experiences. These are memories. There is no past nor future. That is only the human-constructed measurement of time.
There is only Now. Presence.
You are not the trauma nor sorrow of your past. The essence of you is beyond thought, beyond time and space. You are immeasurable, and all that is. You can be it, one can’t know it. You are Whole. Letting go, beyond the personal, in complete presence, is the unconditioned. Freedom without trying to be free. Loving without trying to love. There is no trying to be someone. You are IT.
The costume of self is removed. In this place, you see, there never was a self. In fact, you see that what one calls the ego is more aligned with a navigational system that helps our organism survive and thrive both individually and collectively. When needed, it functions perfectly. One sees that one need not personalize this system when we don’t need it. When we are in a place to be simple, the system quiets. When it is needed, thinking, like breath, comes forth naturally.
Simple.
I write this treatise because I see that humanity is lost in the underbelly of an unconscious dysfunctional and traumatic conditioning implanted by the hierarchical capitalistic cultural system in which we live and play out our parts. Teaches us to personalize a separate self. Culture and society is simply an experimental way in which to live. If the experiment begins to illustrate throughout the time that it is harming the earth, that it is creating harm in individuals and people collectively, then we need to look at that and change the way we live and experiment until we discover how to live in balance with all of life and sustain our living systems for eons. Yet, many of us who live in our society don’t see our culture as inherently unhealthy and violent and taking us off a cliff of our own destruction. This is a system that is taught to us, and we buy into it without realizing that it is an illusion and that we can fundamentally change it.
We have a culture that tries to destroy the individual — the undivided wholeness of who we are (that is actually the root meaning of the word individual) into a separated caricature that will fit into a materialistic hierarchy. Generally speaking, we have been taught to shut out our wonder and curiosity through our schooling or from our parents. We have been taught that our voice doesn’t matter and not to listen to what arises within ourselves, to shut out our wholeness and create an artificially isolated self that creates dysfunction in our innate navigational system in order to perpetuate an isolative power-structured society.
Education has destroyed learning, taken us away from wonder, and continually created and perpetuated the thinking patterns that sprout the artificial divisions of the world. Instead of learning which comes from when one feels safe, open, and curious, education uses coercion through tests and grades and forces children to go through a curriculum that has nothing to do with their interests or wonder.
In our family systems, most children are taught to push down their curiosity, playfulness, and wonder as they get older. Many are subjugated to abuse and, thereby, trauma. All these things force children into building protective selves that become who they think they are. They are then pushed to play a role in society. These societal-created selves are not separate from this cultural matrix. The roles we play are the matrix. This artificially generated self is the culture and is the collective. We are not separated from these things.
Education has taught us not to look at the problem itself but to turn away and try and fix it. There is no understanding of the real issue as we are taught to escape from feeling and looking at what we perceive to be negative. We are taught to push everything down and escape through a multitude of addictions. The self tries to find some way to fill in the emptiness they have been forced to live with through the addictions of positive thinking, sporting events, gambling, alcohol and drugs, comfort, perfectionism, war, drama, etc. The list goes on and on.
Mirroring the self, we are taught collectively not to think about or feel the consequences of our actions. For example, when we tear apart a mountain for coal, we only think about the short-term benefits of cheap energy and money. We don’t look at the real costs that greatly outnumber the gains. We blind ourselves from seeing the devastating effect it has on the ecosystems, the water and soil impacts, the loss of habitat, the impact on communities below the mining site, and the impact it has on our climate. Because of this lack of ecological thinking (thinking that derives from wholeness and sees the interconnections of life), we are tearing apart the strands of our living systems, and if this is to continue, we will unwittingly destroy ourselves — for we are innately connected to these living systems.
We teach numbness and perpetuate insensitive seekers who will continuously buy into the materialistic ways of capitalism to try and find some sort of connection or escape to deal with the emptiness inside oneself and collectively. Instead of allowing the child to have space to learn, to have space to explore their curiosity and wonder, we place them in schools with a prescribed curriculum, with prescribed transitions, plug them all into the same trajectory, and then test them and grade them on their knowledge, making them compete or fail for an external reward. This has nothing to do with learning. In fact, it destroys learning, makes children compete against each other, and learn that their interests and voices don’t matter and that authority is what you must follow. Later, we will go deeper into this and look at what it means to learn and what it means to help a child meet their fullest potential truly.
Have you ever wondered if it is possible for human beings to live in peace and balance with each other and the earth? With so many people and seemingly so many problems, is it possible for us to change? The answer is yes. Yet, the challenge is that this change means that we all need to begin the arduous journey of self-discovery — to actually not run away from problems, but rather to confront them head on and to really look — and to look not with a desire to change it, but to actually see in total clarity. Any desire or belief of how to go about it will distort what one is looking at. Only quietly, with full attention, can we begin to see what is happening. If you are willing to look within and want to wake up, then continue reading. If you are not interested, then this is not for you.
If we were to be completely honest with ourselves and sit for a while with no agenda, with no escape, one may begin to see that what is perceived as “normal” consciousness is a delusion, an imprisonment of our own doing that has created within our cultural construct — hierarchy and division, racism and sexism, poverty, and ownership, and the war against the environment. We would see that our brutal conception of society called civilization is generated by our own thinking. We would see that we no longer need to hold onto this ignorance. We would see that what one is wholeness, beyond measurement, time, space, and thought. Wholeness has no beginning or end.
Yet, for millennia, people have not been able to break free, so they are stuck in their cultural ideology, an ideology built and consistently taught to children from deep-seated individual and collective insecurity. Our hierarchal society propagates the idea of progress to satiate its desire for growth, control, power, and domination of the elite upon the rest of us. This culture’s population has risen exponentially in this constant desire for growth. It seems that the more people there are, the more chaotic things become, and the more centralized governments and corporations (presently) battle for control, power coercion at any cost over those that have little or no voice.
These arbitrary rules are dictated by those in power and placed down on the populace through propaganda and education. Education creates the cultures’ mythological roles that we all play out through the conditioning brought on by schooling, parenting, laws, and the nuances of one’s place within the oppressive hierarchy. Because most teachers have very little idea that they are perpetuating this, over time, the system constricts their own freedom and voice as they end up playing out their own roles in handing over these destructive policies upon our children’s psyche. This power of coercion is in the making of roles and structures that are unnatural and dysfunctional, seem and appear quite normal, natural, and real.
In actuality, these laws, hierarchy, and division don’t exist except in our conditioned beliefs, individually and collectively. We have been taught to see the world in parts. The cartesian split just magnified the direction our society was already heading and implementing. The world is divided, can be controlled and measured, and resources were there for human consumption. Based on this, we have been going down a path toward our destruction. Nature is us. When we try to control and conquer nature and ourselves, we put ourselves in direct conflict with who we are and destroy the very lifeblood that gives rise to life itself — we are destroying the ecosystems which we need in order to survive.
If we are at all interested in stopping the violence we perpetuate within ourselves and in the world, then we must look at our society at large without ignorance and see our own separatist beliefs and cultural conditioning and let go of the roles we play within the societal framework. As importantly, we must change how we see and interact with our children and let their wonder, voice, and wholeness blossom.
We are not who we think we are. We are not Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Taoist, or atheist. We are not a communist or socialist, nor Republican or Democrat. We are not an American nor a Russian. There is, in actuality, nothing to own or steal. Labeling ourselves in any way destroys our ability to communicate with one another. For example, in wars, leaders try and make sure that soldiers don’t interact with the perceived “enemy” for fear of them becoming friends and then not having the motivation anymore to fight. Let us stop the madness and business. Let us pause and question. Talk with each other, and dialogue and come together not only to see that we are whole but all in this together. How can this look? I have ideas. And I am sure you do as well. Let’s talk about it and inspire each other. What do you think? Continue the dialogue….
