Dare to leap into the origin. Asvaghosa, The Awakening of Faith
DESPERATE. It’s the one word that immediately springs to mind about this situation: Telling a 4 year old child and her bewildered father that she cannot cycle to school on the ‘footpath’ but instead has to use the road. Seriously? I mean seriously???? And then, if that wasn't bad enough, being warned (threatened more like by idiots with tasers) that if he (the police officer) looks in his rear-view mirror and sees the child still on her bicycle on the footpath he will turn around, come back, and confiscate the child’s bicycle (complete with stabilisers).
You will forgive me if I profess to the world being mad, to the insanity of the rigidness of rules and regulations (the fear & trembling) that prevent people in positions of authority from using the power of discretion (a noble attribute if ever there was one) and the power of independent and critical thinking based upon context. Context, after all, is everything. If you cannot take the context into account and make your decisions accordingly, then you might as well be a zombie. Alas! this is what the masses have become, browbeaten as they are by conventions and media. They act upon superimposed templates that have been handed down to them from nefarious sources, emphatically not their own. And when you start outsourcing your thinking and, by extension your being, to idiots, then you can only expect things like this to occur. Original thinking and original being (that which originates within and not without) are left by the wayside. What remains is mechanical and automatic. Gone is the sensitive and intelligent response. Intelligence after all, as its etymology suggests [from the Latin inter + legere, to read between], presupposes a context in its reading between (the lines).
I find it more than a little ironic that this occurs on the same day (11.03.2015) that a petition is signed to re-instate Jeremy Clarkson (following his dismissal by the BBC for another strop), as it was, according to a spokesman, in the interests of the ‘motor industry’ to keep Top Gear rolling
And so here we have, (reading between the lines as one must necessarily do in an overly deceptive society), an illuminating situation: the effective industrialization of the human.
Even the zombies can see this - in the dehumanising activities that people call work, jobs whose sole purpose is to sell people stuff they simply do not need; in the modern addiction to sensationalism and media; in the apparent absence of original thinking and original moving; and in the culminating readiness to sell one's vitality to the maker of machines (the irony being that in this 'selling', one actually pays).
And so it is that society is insane. And that I occasionally rage against it.
The health and holiness of the self (based upon its own originary forces) is cast off in favour of something a little more 'instant', something a little more exciting. Yet, if the idea (nevermind the practice) of life itself no longer stimulates you, then there's definitely something wrong somewhere. The sacred (which is of course the upholding of life itself and its inextricable binding to body-mind-world) is sold off like a two-bit condominium to the point where the world (which is actually the self) becomes a mess of conflicts and crises, and nonsenses. Nonsenses like a four year old being threatened by an adult who has been vested with the ultimate boddhisattvic act of looking out for us; nonsenses like an immature and juvenile manchild preaching the effective godhood of a machine that does nothing but strip us of our own vital energies whilst simultaneously polluting our environment (and our vision of it through screen and speed).
The health and holiness of the self (based upon its own originary forces) is cast off in favour of something a little more 'instant', something a little more exciting. Yet, if the idea (nevermind the practice) of life itself no longer stimulates you, then there's definitely something wrong somewhere. The sacred (which is of course the upholding of life itself and its inextricable binding to body-mind-world) is sold off like a two-bit condominium to the point where the world (which is actually the self) becomes a mess of conflicts and crises, and nonsenses. Nonsenses like a four year old being threatened by an adult who has been vested with the ultimate boddhisattvic act of looking out for us; nonsenses like an immature and juvenile manchild preaching the effective godhood of a machine that does nothing but strip us of our own vital energies whilst simultaneously polluting our environment (and our vision of it through screen and speed).
A society that is weaned on the idea that the car is somehow inherently ‘good’, and that those who don’t have one are somehow lacking, is a society in existential decline and a society that deceives. A sedentary society is an insane society. But we can see this already, surely, in the new environment that has sprung up around us and which we have labelled 'obesogenic' and 'irreligious'.
As I have said before, and I am not the first, human-ness and vitality begins with one’s capacity to think and move for oneself, for the self-energizing agent within all of us, that binds us (religions us) to the soil and to the earth. When we ignore this fundamental life-force, and worse still, outsource it to a machine or a set of inelastic rules which further cement our ‘fatness’ (of mind and of body) then we are not too far from the edge of the precipice that leads to the abyss.
The only solution is to get rid of the car, and conventions, and start making your own way through the world, start devising your own rules based upon your own automotive energy, your own auto-poetic dynamism. The genius is he who uses his own engines! Who re-cognizes the emergency of being.
Do not allow the machine to usurp your origin. Rage against it! It is your duty, and responsibility.
As I have said before, and I am not the first, human-ness and vitality begins with one’s capacity to think and move for oneself, for the self-energizing agent within all of us, that binds us (religions us) to the soil and to the earth. When we ignore this fundamental life-force, and worse still, outsource it to a machine or a set of inelastic rules which further cement our ‘fatness’ (of mind and of body) then we are not too far from the edge of the precipice that leads to the abyss.
The only solution is to get rid of the car, and conventions, and start making your own way through the world, start devising your own rules based upon your own automotive energy, your own auto-poetic dynamism. The genius is he who uses his own engines! Who re-cognizes the emergency of being.
Do not allow the machine to usurp your origin. Rage against it! It is your duty, and responsibility.
[Both articles can be found here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-31811572
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-31832698]
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