blushing, i admit i inadvertantly lied to this person. i did not think of it until after sending the reply, and now am torn. on the one hand, this is imperative learning for me…. on the other, i said this would be words to them alone.
i choose to believe they will understand. and forgive.
you wrote:
> you know, this has applications to self cultivation as well as social?
> great parable.
yes. i find most things have the ability to apply across many things, it is simply a matter of being willing to see them so.
> I AM thinking about peoples needs. I am thinking about the
> complexities of the issues. But people want simple. They want warm
> fuzzies. They want to evade and avoid even thinking about or
> realizing that they are in the cage. They want their comfort zones,
> and they want to think that the things that they are doing and have
> done have worked and are sufficient.
indeed. and they will think them as long as they want to, even if you stand in front of them in a 50,000 lumin, neon, strobbing sign upon which the manifest truth is emblazoned.
people see what they want to see. nothing more. ever.
> Yes, i’d love to have that feeling of connection. And i have
> experienced mental telepathy. I would love to have that feeling of
> belonging; but there is no group that will have me; and no group
> which shares my vision or my goals. Understanding? Of course i long
> to be understood. But that possibility vanishes further and further
> behind the event horizon of where i went and can go that others can’t
> and won’t. Acceptance? Absolutely, give me a double dose, i need it.
this is not true. it is a statement of the point of certainty. as opposed to an absolute truth.
humans are funny creatures. we progress so rapidly in some ways, and are like stubborn mules in others. we are forever proclaiming what we know, even as it is changing before our eyes and making liars of us.
we are arrogant. proud. loud in our braying, we mules in the field. (grin)
but it remains that for all we ‘know’, we rarely know anything. and the things we do know we’re forever shying from as if somehow, we can close our eyes and they will magically disappear.
sometimes i ponder the nature of the futility that is such aversion and avoidance. how is it we do not see that we spend easily five times the effort trying to avoid a thing than we would simply to have embraced it to begin with?
not to mention the suffering we undergo as a result of attempting to deny what is 50,000 lumins, neon, strobing, right in our faces.
all the same, humans will choose to deny. and there is no remedy for it but to choose differently. and that choice rests firmly within each one of us… and to it, we stubbornly cling… the most sacred, secret-hidden-in-plain-sight there is… the world and all in it may take all things, any thing, in any moment… but this one thing it cannot as much as breathe upon. choice. the single point of absolute control that every human being possesses.
one of the very few things we ever know we possess… even as most times, we spend entire lifetimes in denial of it… as if somehow, the torment of such denial is itself, some great sacrifice of self when, in fact, it is merely a sacrifice of what self would be… in the name of frustration and anger for lacking any greater grip upon the world than that smallest, indestructible diamond that we know as our own.
> And every journey upward takes me farther across that gulf from
> humanity.
and yet you are no more distant from humanity than your next breath. paradox. the presence of which is best and most pointed indicator of Truth.
> And i’ll go further into why. Lets just say that half of the things
> you take for granted in your life i didn’t have. I didn’t have a
> father in the house. I didn’t have a nurturing mother; i had a
> drugged up 30 year old infant whom i had to take care of. I didn’t
> have money. I didn’t have prom. I didn’t have a car for my 16h
> birthday. I didn’t have a place to put a pot, or the time or the
> energy or the money to buy a plant or soil. My life has been by
> karmic design as hard as it would have to be to force me kicking and
> screaming to climb that cosmic tree.
>
> My situation is more desperate and more exhausted than you could
> probably guess at. But still, here i am, day after day, plugging
> away, trying to rouse up some kind of awakening.
here, i will say both that assumptions are dangerous and they are also the mortar and brick by which connection is impeded. you do not know my life, nor my experiences, nor my torments. and from what you share here, i can with certainty say i could meet, match, and very likely exceed were it a thing in which there could possibly be wisdom — to compete for the title of most injured, most greviously wounded, most heroic in the face of shadow.
i do not say that to be cruel, but to demonstrate a very simple point, one that i know you already know if you spend even half the time considering things as these words indicate — pain, like delight, is relative. there is no scale upon which your sorrows or mine may be balanced. thus, there is no scale upon which they may ever be compared.
> trying to get people to realize they are in that cage, trying to get
> people to make the effort to escape from the collective hell. Trying
> to break through the noise of a thousand charlatans who don’t know
> how to get there.
>
> So here is my seed, and here is my water, and here is my plantfood.
> Here are my eggs and my hopes and my dreams; here i lay it all on the
> table; here i am, working in my garden, trying to get the plant that
> is this thread to grow.
>
> But the soil is weak. Tribe is a place where people talk in the short
> little bursts they are programmed to, where i am derided for making
> posts that are “too long”. Where the staff are themselves a batch of
> troll freindly integrityless players and participants in the great
> big noise making experiment.
you cannot liberate me. i can only liberate myself. this is no matrix, it would be too convenient if it were. consider it. know it truth. rather, this is nexus… nodes upon an infinite network, where the most that may be hoped is that communion is deep enough and tender enough to allow the message to arrive with fidelity. the methods distract, impede. we get in the way of ourselves… which is telling, as it is only in the commonalities that we ever find hope of better and yet, we forever expound and hound and snarl and scrabble and fight and bite and incite one another over our differences.
we use ego and “knowledge” and that dramatic persona to stand forth and puff our chests out and say, ‘listen to me and know…’ as if so easily we can forget that of us which is never willing to trust another so well as the ballpeen hammer to the temple called experience.
consider the plight of a mind in which this reality is not yet embraced. where, in denial of what is, the constant struggle, the constant failure to convince, convert, and change another.
can we point to a single human who, of themselves, as much as managed to breathe upon the mind of another but that such breath was welcome?
there are not enough facts in the world to turn an implacable mind, my friend. it is foolishness to believe otherwise.
but that does not mean it is hopeless. every moment, there are those who, having unfurled slowly from within themselves, finally turn introspection outward… seeking… reaching… needing to make contact and have assurance of being understood… of those commonalities truly being as they are… contact and confirmation in which the foundations of that which emboldens change may sink deeply and take root.
> I could be at the hot springs right now, meditating on who knows
> what. By your advice, working out how to make a more sociable
> approach.
>
> well, i’m not a social genius. I’m just the aspie that karma and
> dharma dragged kicking and screaming up the cosmic tree, so that God
> could make me promise to try to help other people make their way
> also.
i am, of course, a fool. for all i would say these things to you, believing in every way you will feel them resonate with that which is truth, i have no way to know you will do so.
so, instead of speaking them with force and in a place where the etiquettes and demands of the social machine will engender their own reflex and reaction in you, i speak them quietly, calmly, and with the same smile as ever i held to read your name… here… where the only two who hear them, who will ever hear them… are me… and you.
may they land softly and be other than astringent upon the skin.
may they arrive with a bouquet of fellowship and the ribbon of what would be friendship intact.
may they be soft to the touch, may they caress rather than slice, may they be the very velvet in which my spirit most wanted to wrap you when first i saw you, heard you, and in you knew myself.