You are Part of It

The reason the media fail to recognize the message of the Wall Street Occupation Movement is that they don't know what the rest of us know. They are part of the corporate ruling structure and it isn't at all obvious to them why people people are so worked up or what they want. It is an expression of a dawning realization that our whole system is rotten. Now, the rottenness of the system is not going to be universally perceived, just as the revolution will not be televised, thank you Gill Scott-Heron. The truth is known by everyone in a primal way. When they call us consumers and consume us at the same time, we get it. When they say they are the source of all that is good and that we rely on their brilliance and creativity while they destroy our public education system through propaganda and ever decreasing funding, we get it. When they are eating us for lunch and telling us we should be grateful, we see the self serving lie. Yea, we get it.

Leonard Cohen writes and sings this mood of eyes wide open recognition of perpetual betrayal. This seeing through the lie is what is going on and why the elite don't get it. As Cohen's lyrics put it in Everybody Knows;

Today while meditating I came upon some ideas that pull together several themes in the form of a series of areas around which I want to develop rituals and processes that facilitate identity transformation.

Intouchness: 

Start with strengthening intouchness as a foundation for other more specific explorations of self as nature. Identify persistent themes that emerge in the process of strengthening the ability to stay in touch with the ever changing totality of our experience and let that begin to define my path of action.

I have been meditating recently in an attempt to provide a ritual, some time and attention, to nourish my transition from an identity that confines self to the separate sense of self abstracted from nature to a sense of self that is not separate from nature. What has made sense to me is to focus on the sense of being in a relationship of touch with all of my experience whether traditionally viewed as inner or outer. Intouchness isn’t a real word as far as I know but it is the word that comes to mind when I try to capture the sense of holding all of my life as the experience of nature.

My first attempt at unifying the personal and the environmental in a single identity and then embarking on a unified clean up of self within and without the skin self boundary has failed the first week plan. I have gained weight, not meditated and have mostly lost sense of unified identity I was experiencing earlier.

Failure is a relief, failure is interesting, failure can be a path to follow into something new. So where new? Where, in what direction? Am I looking at this process with new inspiration and insight but with old eyes.

Since I am nature I am going to start where I can do the most immediate good, my non-extended small personal body. My body is polluted both within the boundary of my skin and outside my skin boundary. Rivers are clogged with the excess and toxic byproducts of industrial consumption, so I am sure are my arteries, blood and tissues. There is excess, fat, silt, trash, that is interfering with my living in a way that contributes to the good of all in a stable way that healthy living systems grow.

Every time I hear people talk, or writers write, about “the environment” I feel uneasy. It doesn’t matter whether the person speaking or writing is advocating consumption or conservation of “the environment”, something in the way environment is objectified and we as people are separated from “It” is deeply disturbing to me. When I had my primary insight into the truth that I am the environment, there is no separation between a me and an environment, it was from following this discomfort and seeing where it took me.

I am going to pursue a shift in identity that has been developing in me for some time but only recently has it emerged with an intensity and clarity that felt like a transition point. A few days after attending an introduction to the work that reconnects facilitated by Joanna Macy I had an experience that I described as follows.

Well, spending two days with Joanna and participating in the exercises she lead was wonderful. I loved being around all the people, getting to know some of them and generally doing more crying, hugging and looking at people in a deeply engaged and appreciative way. The permission to really connect with each other was, for me, a wonderful tonic. I love people and am rarely in a situation where I can connect deeply, what a great experience.

I have been seeing the implications of the Buddhist dependent co-arising causality model. On the level of individual psychology and time the changes that occur in my perspective are liberating. When I understand that there is no linear process to adhere to in my psychology I realize that i am not bound by the line from the past propagating into the future as the western psychological model mandates. It isn’t that the past doesn’t exist or isn’t part of what conditions the present it is that there isn’t a linear past and future with the present just being one of Hume’s distinct moments.