Here we go, time and again, as if it is a routine, as if it is our daily duty, we go off and try to change other people, fixing their minds, adjusting their behaviours; hoping to make everybody’s lives better: we are facing ourselves in other people; working with mirror images. This removes me from my own issues; it projects my own issues; it is an attmept to flea the FEAR and it amounts to thinking of my own preservation. This is self-love at fault again!
Ultimately it leads to superficial realities, which no longer even have a skin (only a screen).
By then we have lost our one shot at becoming real and we live an illusion.
All we can really do, in a totally free world, is attend to ourselves. Not in fear, but in hope, with great trust, which creates a true understanding - of my world as of myself. A fear of water doesn’t save you from drowning.
The practice of self-improvement is a sober and grounded activity first and foremost, as befits a physical body, which after all, is all we have by which to call ourselves alive.
Many things can aid you in this intention to improve yourself, from salts to shrinks. Ultimately, it will boil down to you knowing what you need to help get you back in balance.
Where did this overwhelming sense of injustice come from?
It is human nature, and of our Individualisation Era, that we are quick to feel trapped in our bodies, our homes, our social obligations, our economical necessities. On top of that the world can feel really rotten down to the core. Three cheers for Denis Mukwege, Nobel Peace Prize winner, who reminds the oblivious world:
But it's not cheery news. Not news at all. Women: those bringers of joy to the world, scorned, debased, trashed. What's the gain in that? Only it's nothing to do with injustice - not on the level that can really change and make us different. It has to do with ignorance of soul and a paralysis of will. If only we could design educational systems which focus to strengthen these weaknesses! Ojalá, inshallah, I wish upon a falling star (or a strong meteor shower! Hope you used the Geminid one to your fullest wishing potential).
In comparison to the women of the Congo…. There can be no comparison…. Still, oppression and violation of the right to be free happens in every city, town, hamlet in our world….under our very noses. It justifies us to stay close to home. It needs us to step out of the dock where we get to say our piece, and refrain from balancing the scales in terms of “justice”. Remember Dr.Phil: “would you rather be right or love and be loved?”
How can my 9-5 job bring out the best of me? Why am I pushing another supermarket trolly, again? Isn’t it more honest to never go back home to where the trauma began and keeps repeating itself? Such inquiries belong to one’s path of self-realisation and self-refinement. The path is an alchemical one and has many successive phases, each dependent on the former’s full and true completion: timing and correct observation is of the essence.
I suck a little harder.
I "taste" how in Salt No. 1 (calcium fluoride) I must address my flexibility; Salt No. 2 (calcium phosphate) steers us towards a larger cohesive effort: keep that temple of yours well maintained. Treat it like the Corinthia hotel….
Demand excellence, use your eye for detail, let it shine.... rate yourself five-star! Go on, you deserve it! Charge accordingly besides!
And No.4 ought to keep me close to home and at the mercy of my sensory perception, which reaches farther than the face in the mirror, deeper than what the (failing) eyes and ears can absorb for me. It permeates my nerves, my brain, my cellular structure with cosmic rays, if only I strip myself of this encapsulating fear.
How free am I? Are you? Are we? Until we dream a collective dream we must call ourselves dispersed rather than free.
It is only human to use the reflections of the world around us for indications of how we are doing, and since I am only a part of greater whole, there is some validity in monitoring my own progress by observing others nearest to me. Yet, we have to let go of this innate flaw that wants to dominate and secure one’s own standpoint as if otherwise the ground beneath ones very feet would be claimed by another pair. It belongs to a baser (astral/animal) nature.
True, such despotic threats exist all around us - even in our own homes. Living a life that merely serves to protect oneself against such usurption, however, is not to live in trust and with forward thinking.
In the vulnerability exposed to us through our imperfections, even our coarser crimes, there is raw and refinable hope.
