Everything changes with the realization that one belongs primarily to life and only secondarily to culture and society. Life is all there, and so it is incorrect to think that one has a life, or that life is in one. Cultural formulations, societal structures and personal identities are trenches and parapets separating us from life and from each other in exchange for a false sense of security in particular identity and social status.
All
our mental and social problems are the result of this psychological and tribal
alienation, so it is naïve to expect their
resolution from new or revamped forms of personal change and
institutional reform that leave intact our collective separation from
life. It is the very experience and aspirations of different social
groups and individuals, that blind humanity as a whole to the fact of
its seamless integration with the whole movement of life.
We generally refuse to see the extent to which our organismic reality is deeply enmeshed in the boundless torrent of cosmic life, and are frightened to death by the loss of personal identity implied in yielding to the undifferentiated embrace of the totality. This wrongheaded denial of our fundamental nature preserves the conflicted segmentation of human society, not just through tradition and habit, but by cruelly burdening every newborn child with the same illusory sense of physical and mental separation. Thus conditioned, we take life to be a battle in which everyone is compelled to defend and fulfill his personal identity by following the dictates of particular desires and fears. To simply realize the falseness of this sense of life, does change everything. Nothing else does.
We generally refuse to see the extent to which our organismic reality is deeply enmeshed in the boundless torrent of cosmic life, and are frightened to death by the loss of personal identity implied in yielding to the undifferentiated embrace of the totality. This wrongheaded denial of our fundamental nature preserves the conflicted segmentation of human society, not just through tradition and habit, but by cruelly burdening every newborn child with the same illusory sense of physical and mental separation. Thus conditioned, we take life to be a battle in which everyone is compelled to defend and fulfill his personal identity by following the dictates of particular desires and fears. To simply realize the falseness of this sense of life, does change everything. Nothing else does.
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