It is no measure of one’s health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society
-J.Krishnamurti
Courage
Tag: current affairs
Going with the flow
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
-Buckminster Fuller
Awakening
The true crisis in our world is not social, political or economic. Our crisis is a crisis of consciousness… an inability to directly experience our true nature… an inability to recognise that nature in everyone and in all things.
Distacco
Moderns who neither kill their own food, nor grow their own food nor bury their own dead would seem to have solved the problem by avoiding it; but in fact the resolution is simply delegated, nowadays, to nightmare, slaughterhouses, torture rooms, death squads, and ‘snuff’ films in which criminal priests perform obscene sacrifices to the gods of displaced responsibility. No one can truly avoid the continuous paradox of life/death as one continuous god or process. Such perception arises from the deepest labyrinth of our psyches, where there is no distinction between ‘primitive’ and ‘modern’. The only difference is that ‘primitives’ strive to be conscious of the paradox; ‘moderns’ try to escape it. But the paradox shows us and ontological maze we cannot sanely deny, destroy, or over leap; we have to learn to walk it again, to dance it, as our ancestors did, with grace, strength, and awe-full wisdom.
The Elderly
A friend wrote to me yesterday:
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This is a phenomenon I have observed for years now. The shock I felt in the UK when I saw how our neighbour, an elderly woman in her late 70s, lived alone with only her dog Suki for company. Her children visited once every two months, if that, and no one to do her shopping, or look after her. My mother’s indignation, asking where her family was, where was the community.
She died in a care home, alone and lonely, so bored of life that she just gave up. You don’t always need an external object for suicide: the mind can become the strongest poison of them all.
The creation of institutions to replace what a community should be doing is an abhorrence. Even in a more traditional and community-minded society like Italy, care homes have increasingly become the norm. Why?
Because of the capitalist over-drive that we find ourselves in. No one has the time, that most precious and scarce of resources nowadays, to look after the elderly, or the sick. In this malaised, consumed, consumer world, Love has been effectively replaced by Money. And so now only money will ensure “care”, but a functional care. An institution can never replace the warmth of human heart, or the kiss on the cheek from lover to beloved.
Did we not learn the lessons from the reservation schools in Canada, from boarding schools across the world? From zoos even? What sort of pain have they produced? A suffering that has become generational in its vastness.
Why do people keep thinking that the more they build, maximise, make efficient, make quick, quicker, the quickest, they will be happy? Wake up world. We are close to the zenith of external progress, with its desire for power and possessions.
“But these places are still run by human beings who care”. Yes, I’m sure that the nurses and care-givers do genuinely care, and have love to give. But again, it goes back to time. The elderly packed in like battery hens on a farm – how much time is there to dedicate to each individual soul? A nurse paid to wipe your arse will never wipe it as softly as your own child. Only they hold the body memory of the way you used to do it for them too, at the beginning of life.
The natural cycle has been interrupted.
Let’s continue to use that great cocktail of drugs of the 20th century, TV and pharmaceutics, to numb ourselves to this madness. Why not. It has worked so effectively, so functionally, for women, the elderly, and the “insane”, has it not? Aren’t we all cured?
This is going to bring nothing except Dantesque suffering.
Let it burn.
Photo Credits: ©Tony Luciani
The Light Lioness 