Saturday, June 6, 2015

But the world, the city, everyone, to some extent, potentially, is ego-fixated.  And deeper thinking is achieved only through seeing through the ego.

If you had a vision that came from being free of ego even you would have a hard time understanding it and putting it into recognizable terms.   Even to yourself it would seem strange.

And the corollary to this is that particularly to the individual wrapped up and attached to ego, the vision will be dismissed.


The world is crafted by the collective take on it.  Washington is Washington, and it becomes so every day.  There is little change, just more fruit from the tree of the collective mind.  Now and again, a subtle change perhaps, but still most of it, nearly all of it fulfilling the vision everyone seems to have of Washington.  The people who come here find it a fit, then make the place more of what and how they see it, of what they project upon it.   Self-fulfilling prophecy.  Ego brings them to fit in to the uses patterned by bigger egos, finding a place to belong.

The other choice is to look beyond, deeper, past the collective subconscious... through deep meditation... becoming less a part of the mainstream's conceptions.

The John F. Kennedy era:  so different in its imposition of a consciousness.  Different from what took hold in Nixon's, and that in turn, far different than Reagan's, and then from that into the W. Bush years, the Cheney influence.  Look at the difference.  The deeper mind, uniting the world through a deeper level of shared consciousness, compared to the shallowest layers of the ego running the mind, the knee-jerk response, the Halliburton wars, the "Patriotism."  Not exactly the eye on top the pyramid.  Each had/has their fruit. The Kennedy era brought forth the Peace Corps, the honest showdown in Cuba over Russian missiles  when it had to, principles standing.  Bush One led to Bush Two, somehow, the egotistical reaction that led to more egotistical reaction, the great opposite of Buddha's principles.  Saber-rattling begets more saber rattling, and before you know it, everyone is at it.

I watched all this take effect in DC.  I saw the town change.  I saw the kind of minds that came.  All you can do is plant seeds.

It was as if new layers of ego were added, piled on top, thickening as a crust over the deeper reality of shared humanity, not unlike the way Hitler added the Nazi ego, his own, his friends.  All it takes is a few.   The people with less an ego don't stand much of a chance.  That's the insidious thing.  The scary thing.

I was a bartender.  I had no idea why.  No idea what I was doing in DC.


The Beau Biden funeral, the eloquent President's eulogy, restores my hopes.  I go for a long walk, all the way to the Zoo.  I see fish of the Amazon, grey seals, an otter, lions, a Sumatran tiger, and then the long walk home.  I took the same route, I remember, a long time ago, when I got dumped.

But my mind still aches from the unresolved, the things that seem to have left me treading water the last twenty five years.  If I'd resolved them I could have cleanly moved on, one way or the other.  The weight of it turns me away from being happy enough to be able to spend time with family.

That makes some of us more disposed to meditate on the collective subconscious.  Not being man enough to put things past me, out of my mind.

No comments: