The Day the Earth Stood Still
This morning was one of those times when the mind would not settle down. Excited by the events of yesterday. Just to note it, on Wednesday, January 6 a group of inbred Trump cultists stormed the Capital Building in Washington with little resistance from law enforcement. Being egged on by the commander in chief, who cannot come to terms with having lost an election, they paraded around the building taking artifacts, selfies, disrupting senatorial and congressional offices and just producing mayhem. They held the place in a state of terror and accomplished nothing more than creating chaos. The outcome is massive media reaction and a flood of Facebook posts expressing disgust. Tomorrow, everyone goes back to shoving their fingers up their own asses.
It is hard not to respond to events that we are living through. It is my hope that this can serve another purpose. And it is the word “service” that was stuck in my craw this morning. All the energy of my morning sitting got rerouted up to my head until I finally had to concede that this is my condition today and that the best way to deal with it is to come to the computer and write about it.
Yesterday, while journeying back from my weekly shopping jaunt, I had the opportunity to listen to a podcast that was recommended to me by my wife. The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance by Robin Wall Kimmerer - an Emergence Magazine Podcast. It expressed some ideas about how indigenous people view life. It spoke about the definition that “Economy” in our culture is described as scarcity while the concept of the “Gift Economy” described everything in service to everything else. In listening I had to accept that this was not part of my upbringing nor a common mode for me to think in.
The word “service” usually sends shudders up and down my spine. My first response to that word is similar to what happens when my home phone rings. “Who is it and what do they want from me now?” Our culture is not built on reciprocity. It is built on every man for himself. If we were to identify the basis for our current ills—racism, income inequality, rampant poor health, poor self esteem, hyper anxiety and on and on, it would probably be described as man's inability to recognize his true purpose on this planet. It is this that most concerns me and it is an impossible quandary we are in. Unless there is a movement toward self realization, these maladies will persist for as many generations that have preceded us, going forward. The question is, will man ever sense his true purpose ever again? What is the purpose of this time we are living in? It must have some meaning.
Ms. Kimmerer is an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation,[1] and combines her heritage with her scientific and environmental passions. She expressed ideas about life in a way that was original for me. One was how she described plants as “relatives.” As she was speaking in her particular style of prose, one began to have the sense that everything in the natural world is designed to serve everything else. Everything was a “gift” to everything else. What a wonderful and unique way of looking at things.
As I pondered this I had to also consider the gifts that had been given to me by my own teachers and mentors. As a participant in the teachings of Gurdjieff for the past 45 years, it became clearer to me that a simple gift was passed on to me and my compatriots. The gift of attention. An attention which at first was focused only on the simple sensation of my limbs which enabled me to recognize the reality that my being was enslaved to patterns of thought, emotion and tensions which were (and are) tied up in a mutually sustaining knot. The process of working and developing this attention has relaxed much of what this knot is composed of and has helped to develop a quality of presence at times that is connected to a greater whole. A whole that is not only my own body, but that of a greater atmosphere and hence, the cosmos.
It is recognizing that this is a “gift” and one begins to sense the responsibility of having been given something so rare in this world, rarer than diamonds or gold. The realization that comes with this is the sheer powerlessness in the face of events and the recognition that the core of the problem is exactly what Gurdjieff stated: Man is Asleep. And unless he begins to awaken, no other possibility exists for him.He is locked in a dream. Great nature needs this energy, this connection and that if we do not work to produce it in some relatively conscious manner, then terrible things will continue to happen in this world. We are as many indigenous cultures describe us: “life out of balance.”
A Gift Economy or a Resource based economy where we share the bounty of the planet makes sense to most of us and we need not attach a label such as Socialism or any other ism to it. We are not right wing or left wing. We are people. If we could boil it all down, there are many things we all would like that are the same: food, shelter, well being. The insanity comes from the imbalance. It is generated by an economy where some want more than they need.
In the biblical story of Manna from Heaven, Moses is able to gain a boon from god. Manna from heaven would fall each day to the people in the desert. They are to take ONLY WHAT THEY NEED. If they take more than they need, it will become rotten and worm ridden. It is safe to say that what we are witnessing here in America is that something stinks and it is not yesterday’s fish.
This is an extraordinary time in our lives. It is historically precedent, but for us unique. How to process this in a way that it will give way to greater intelligence. Trump has thrown the covers off of what we are. We have always known it, but somehow we have been able to look away and carry on with our day. Now the worm ridden carcass of a rotting American system is there for us to see. A country founded on genocide, enslavement, exploitation and disease cannot go forward without a reckoning. A reckoning is a realization of the truth and no one can be excluded from that truth. Not the oppressors or the oppressed. Both have equal responsibility in this drama.
For me the only thing that makes any sense is the growth of attention. The immersement in purpose. The process of making my daily existence meaningful. It supports the birth of an energy that can exist in my body, heart and mind and connect all of us to the true meaning of God. An entity that defies concept, defies reaction, is beyond ordinary judgements or rationals. It is not a religion or a cult. It is a divine entity that abound and is threaded through everything. It disperses fear and anxiety. It realligns the relationship of ALL beings and enlightens us to the fact that EVERYTHING is connected and therefore EVERYONE is important. We are a small and infinitesimal part of the universe. Opening to our divine purpose is the only thing I know that can interfere with our rapid movement toward the precipice. It may be that in order for something to awaken on the scale I describe, we may need to go over that precipice.
The monkey is reaching
For the moon in the water.
Until death overtakes him
He’ll never give up.
If he’d let go the branch and
Disappear into the deep pool,
The whole world would shine
With dazzling pureness. — Hakuin