Find the common thread

A few excerpts from my essays and speaking, which I discovered on my Instagram channel. Sharing with you while I brew an ambitious essay I hope to share with you soon:

1. If you attack the symptom without addressing the cause, you are in a state of endless war.

2. Most of the behaviors we condemn come from a crisis of being, of belonging, of connection.

3. When wealth is separate from accumulation but refers to a richness of relationships, each person’s wealth makes everyone wealthier.

4. War mentality saturates our polarized society, which envisions progress as a consequence of victory — victory over a virus, over the ignorant, over the left, over the right, over the psychopathic elites, over Donald Trump, over white supremacy, over the liberal elites. Each side uses the same formula, and that formula requires an enemy. So, obligingly, we divide ourselves up into us and them, exhausting 99% of our energies in a fruitless tug of war, never once suspecting the true evil power might be the formula itself.

5. Every choice that we make individually and collectively is a kind of prayer that aligns us with a certain reality and a certain future. It's a declaration of what a human being does in this circumstance. It says, Here is who I want to be. Here is the world I want to live in.

6. The ultimate fulfillment of civilization’s program of control would be to triumph over death itself. Failing that, modern society settles for a facsimile of that triumph: denial rather than conquest. Ours is a society of death denial, from its hiding away of corpses, to its fetish for youthfulness, to its sequestering of old people in nursing homes.

7. The story of us and them, justified and unjustified, good guys and bad guys, annihilates compassion at its source.

8. Because the New Age is not the triumphant culmination of the ‘progress’ of the current age, it expresses an entirely different story of the world, a different story of the human being, a different story of the self, and a different story of what is real.

9. The proliferation of cults and conspiracy theories mirrors the increasingly unhinged absurdity of official realty and the lies and propaganda that maintain it.

10. When the self is understood as relational, interdependent, even interexistent, then it bleeds over into the other, and the other pleads over into the self. Understanding the self as a locus of consciousness in a matrix of relationship, one no longer searches for an enemy as the key to understanding every problem, but looks instead for imbalances in relationships.

11. Compassion is basically feeling what it’s like to be somebody else. It is the experience of identifying with somebody else and knowing what it’s like to be them. It comes from the question, what is it like to be you? What are the conditions that have made you into who you are? And how can I participate in the evolution of those conditions?

12. By controlling information, dominant institutions engineer passive public consent to the perception-reality matrix that sustains their dominance. The more successful they are in controlling reality, the more unreal it becomes, until we reach the extreme where everyone pretends to believe but no one really does.