Methods of Division

 

The focus is the thing. The thing is the subject and the cause. The ego is the divider, the warrior, and the ruler.

I want to be careful not to make consciousness a game for the ego. I want to encourage the noises and structures that allow us to look at life as a way of mystery while we collectively improve life for all.

For example: If I write about who is to blame for the problems that make our survival difficult, then it becomes a judgment and doesn't encourage conversations on how small individual difficulties can be overcome.

I feel imprisoned when blame is the topic rather than discussing ideas to address a problem recently identified.

Social change can happen with conversation: empathic enquiry, being an ally, being on the side of loving kindness, acting on loving kindness without issuing dogmatic demands. Of course there are dogmatic demands being made by a virus, for example "I am here and I will spread". The arguments come when large organizations demand practices not everyone agrees with. 

This is where challenge enters. I will wear a mask but I am a citizen not a police officer. Tension arises in how I deal with others who are not wearing masks or keeping a physical distance. 

A family may purchase a home and think it's okay to blast the stereo into the early hours of the morning, because the home belongs to them, but the noise wakes up the family in the house next door, who have young children.

False pride and selfishness causes suffering and creates division.

Cutting down trees for profit of a few while destroying habitats for those who live and depend on the forest culture creates a hierarchy of privilege. Privilege creates imbalance of power. Centralized power creates structural violence. Violence creates division not only between groups and species but within our minds and hearts. Culture becomes a battle ground of opinion and reactive blindness.

Earnest Hemingway was a famous American writer who waxed poetic phrases on bullfights and wildlife hunting. The struggle for life and death was a beautiful thing, but it was his life and the animal's death. A life that did not volunteer for that battle. A life that only wanted to survive while the man's ego built his entertainment on the animal's suffering.

But then I eat meat — so an animal is raised in compounds then killed for my diet.

Division is built within existence: meat, fish, dairy, roots, plants, nuts, seeds, oil, cotton, silk: all require other species to be consumed for my survival. But that does not free me from responsibility to choose where I will draw the line between my needs and the well being of others.

Maintaining balance is a precarious struggle between right and wrong, us and them, need and want, comfort and poverty, peace and war, truth and propaganda.

My ego is worth nothing but my loving kindness includes all on this planet for as long as I have life. This is not a choice but an imperative for me. Being a human with freedom depends on this balance. 

Who is to blame for this? No-one.