Originally written Jul 19 2007; published here Nov 30, 2007
It was Wednesday May 23rd. I’d returned from SHARE Spring Festival two days prior, and the combination of an encounter there and two e-mails opened on my return (my cousin Phil and my friend Bob both goading me to write, each in their own way), I was driven to discuss a topic…
A hoot in itself – singles.com is indirectly responsible for one festival attendee…
The now-single mother, a new friend of a friend, brought her two children and ended up camping adjacent, and conversations are inevitable. The woman is working her way through a 12-step program, very open to exposing her issues and such, and starving for interaction regarding general & personal emotional issues. The friend who invited her – an abstract thinker in his own right – did so for the precise reason of exposing her to some new viewpoints – this festival is loaded with them. Mine was one, which slowly unveiled itself through an hour-long conversation Saturday afternoon…and her questioning and exploration of my views gave me a chance to offer my outlooks up in a different, more congealed kind of way. It felt as though so much of what had been swirling and wanting to be connected for so long had been just sitting in my mental dutch oven, and time…and a greater collection of experiences…have now combined the spices from myriad distinct flavors to one larger taste, as it were…
So the conversation on Saturday is most distinctive for the impact I had on this woman – in combinaton with the others to whom she spoke – and the manner in which some of my ideas came out…And I returned home Monday night, and waited until Tuesday to open my e-mail…(51 unread, 44 instant trash)
…and cousin Phil asks, a lone question from out of nowhere: why must we suffer?
…and friend Bob replies to my noting a fourth idle summer looming, and he suggests it time I write my book…I love that line ”my book,” as though it’s just sitting there, waiting to appear magically, as though the idea that “Philip will write a book” is manifest…
[Well, let’s see what happens…]
There was a time, way back when….
…actually, more way way WAY back when…
…when humans, in whatever manner of physical shape and form we were back then, didn’t really quite have the “self-awareness” thing quite down…and there we were, trying to not die, eating, killing, getting killed…and, without being conscious of it, living within the context of the planet’s ecosystem, in balance with the surrounding physical environment – only as far as our feet could carry us. And our planet and future existence was not in peril from our willful, arrogant chocies…
Important aside: how presumptuous is it of us to have the notion that our continued existence is manifest destiny in the first place? Thank goodness the dinosaurs never had the chance to say, “Hey, um, folks, we’ve got this [whatever catastrophic event that caused their extinction] coming up, and we’d better do something about it or we’re done for…and we’re too important to go away.”
So anyway, there we were, and all was well…(hopefully we can agree on the “all was well” point there…)
THEN – a few things happened. Their order is open to question, though it’s ultimately irrelevant in my book.
We stood up. We had to. We wanted to. Our front paws – the ones closest to our eyes – wanted to start reaching out and touching things…
…and pretty soon we wanted to have some of those things we could touch because we figured we’d improve our odds of survival if we had them…but we couldn’t just push them along if we had to get on the move (which we had to do – a LOT), so we needed to pick them up. Leading us right to the thumb.
Quite the upgrade.
And once we got the thumb? Once those front paws turned into extensions of our will? Well, we just HAD to stand up! We needed those things free to do what we wanted them to do without all the fuss and bother of having to worry about transport.
All hell is about to break loose……………..
A beaver gnaws down a couple of trees and builds a home in the river. To some extent he imposes his will on his environment, but overall it is in balance. He’s just a beaver, after all (nothing personal, Mr. Beaver).
Humans? Well well well well well…..now we’ve stood up, our brains are on higher ground, we have these newfangled arms and hands and thumbs…we’re king shit now. We begin to impose our will on the planet to maintain our survival, but now we’ve accelerated things and we move out of balance.
We start to win.
I mean, how else do you think all this self-awareness stuff got started? You wouldn’t start to think of yourself as some thing until you start to think of yourself as something.
And once you do that, and there’s more than one of you…well, that’s when you need to identify and distinguish…and once you figure out that working together is better than trying to kill everyone else, well then you need names and language and all that. (It’s one of the great meetings in human history – the onset of negotiation and trade!)
And humans rise…ain’t we great?
THAT’S why we must suffer. We’ve set ourselves up to be aware of it.
Once we made the shift from “Hey, we’re here!” to “This is ours!” we were fucked.
But wait…”Of course it’s all ours! Look at this grandess of life! Look how we impose our will! Look how all manner of flora & fauna bow to our choices to maintain and flourish! Hell, we’ve even got this God over here that says it’s — (What? What? The God thing’s not ready yet? Oh, ok…”)………..Well, sometime down the road we’ll invent this God that thinks like we do and thinks we’re pretty neat so he gave us this planet…”
IT REALLY DRIVES ME CRAZY HOW SELF-IMPORTANT WE THINK WE ARE.
Jesus, it’s no wonder people create expectations in their head as easy as making saliva! We’re living on this planet where we extract the chemicals and whatever that we need from wherever they may be…and we combine them to create the things around us that we want so we’re cozy and safe. It’s no wonder people think things should go a particular way: the way they want them to go. They turn what they want into what they expect.
We didn’t create God because we were malicious and needed something to justify our existence – we needed something to explain all the shit we couldn’t understand because deep down we all knew we were insignficant and meaningless and frightened. We all know this part, but it’s important we remember it, for we must recognize that humankind’s mistakes were nothing more than choices from fear and trying to stay alive, which cannot be begrudged. We sit not in judgement, but analyze solely for the opportunity to correct errors.
But the creation of GOD and religion and such is, as it turns out, a little irrelevant. It’s difficult to avoid diving into the topic, and I do apologize. What matters in all of this is to see the genesis (get it?) of what each of us undergoes at some point in our lifetime…
…how the question “Why must we suffer?” (”Why must I suffer?“) gets answered.
And the unblemished, anticlimactic answer is…
…because we stood up…
…and we became aware of ourselves…
…and we greedily took every advantage we had in lording over the planet and doing whatever the fuck we wanted…
…and now we’ve set this “manner of living” up that stands in direct opposition to living in balance with the planet that sustains us.
So that’s Part One, the “how we got here” part……
Part Two: What NOW?
Well, I should tell you first to manage your expectations – I have no answers.
What I have – and the part that keeps bubbling up in conversation because it’s always in my head and (as current evidence indicates) it ends up on these pages. I speak of what I see in each and every individual, that which we all have in common. I like to think, silly idealistic romantic that I am, that if more people had an understanding and appreciation of this, we might move towards wiser & more prudent choices as individuals and as a species. Likely not in my lifetime,but you never know……
And it is to be said…that there are holes and gaps and technical points that could be made inside of what I’m going to try and put out here. Fine. Knock yourself out. I’ll likely agree with you. But while you’re humming in quiet triumph to slicing these ideas apart, are you also willing to acknowledge that the spirit behind it is all true, and applicable, and common to all, and self-evident because it is a reality despite your ability to undermine through the perceptual choices you make? If so, then by all means, pile all your inaccuracies up and tell me where it adds up to being wrong in a wholesale sense of the word. Pull that off, and I will bow in deference to the greater sense of it all and to the part that I would have obviously missed.
I say this because I imagine someone else reading the next portion and inventing all these caveats. I want to say, “Don’t ding me about the caveats – it ain’t about the caveats. I won’t disagree with you, but really, in the end of it, they don’t matter – the bigger part is still true because it is a reality which we should all perceive commonly.”
Let us all be bold enough to recognize and collectively acknoweldge that
we are each AWARE of every choice that we make.
From here, let us embrace the empowerment that offers.
Let us then acknoweldge that we
CHOOSE
all of our
moments
thoughts
actions
beliefs
emotions
reactions
…every single goddamm thing in our lives.
Therefore, we can collectively nod to every other person that we are aware of our lives and our choices that we make, every feeling we choose to have, every emotion we choose to experience, every person we choose to talk to, every thing we choose to pick up in our hands, etc. etc. etc…..we know what we’re doing.
That’s all I’m saying for right now – and hopefully you could agree with me and also tell me, if you really wanted to be honest with yourself, that you already knew that.
You already knew that each of us is always aware of the choices that we make, and that everything that happens to each of happens because we choose it to.
So I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. Good, ’cause I’m not trying to.
I embrace the notion that I’m simply one other person with experiences and a perspective that I’m trying to pass along because I’m a hopeful guy at heart…..and if I begin with some fundamental things we can all agree on because we already knew them, then we’re that much further along to agreeing with each other – which we may already do anyway.
Now…….HERE’S the thing about choices……and you have to remember that as it applies to YOU, it applies equally to each and every other person…
As I said, we know what we’re doing. We know what we’re saying.
BUT…
…we don’t always really know why. Especially as it concerns other people – We don’t always know why someone else makes the choices they make with their words or actions.
But you can say that of yourself, too…and it may happen more than you think, or at least more than you’re willing to admit.
You don’t really know why you say or do some of the things you do.
Wait a second. You just said we always know.
You do. But many times you’re unwilling to admit to yourself what is real because it conflicts with what you want. And what you want is more important than what is real, so you create a perception of reality that allows your desires to be met. And you choose this perception over “reality” so you’re free to choose what you want…
…and doesn’t that make you HAPPY?
That was a Rhetorical Question
It leads us, though, into the conclusion – because we are, after all, concerned with your happiness.
And I mean that. I’m concerned about mine, too. Naturally. We all are concerned with our own happiness…
…and in Day 2 (forthcoming), we’ll dive into that. We’re about done with this one for now, though – aren’t you tired?
Thanks for listening.
Philip
One Perspective 