The world was taken apart and sold for parts a long time ago. The only way to get even a spec of it is to let it go.
King David cries,
"I look to the mountains; where will my help come from? My help will come from the Lord, who made heaven and earth." Psalms 121:1-2.
Help for what?
- Do the trees ask for ransom?
- Does the ground he walks on plot to swallow him?
- Is the air in his lungs holding him hostage?
According to British-American Philosopher Alan Watts, this Psalm sums up the operating system of the lifestyle of the Western world and those they have previously conquered. Half a creation, half a will to be done. The Western ideologies (stories) giving rise to a loop of our mental, emotional, and physical experiences.
All ideology is a parasitic oasis latched onto our brains, superimposed on our nature but obscuring it and influencing it within what it projects to be a desert universe.
There are bearable ideologies. The ones that maintain the social cohesive with minimal friction inside each individual. Such ideologies include the Buddhist ideology.
The stories we have made the foundation of our living have come with rise to some of the deadliest abstract viruses like greed, war, fear, helplessness, lack, etc.
Language, symbols, Thought, feelings, the ingredients of reality spells that have bound us in dysfunction. These spells don’t leave a stone unturned, transforming and dictating even the resources that sustain life.
These spells have turned dirt into gold, gold into paper, paper into numbers, and numbers into powerful bodily sensations (self estate) that we can not deny nor ignore.
Chankonabe
Chankonabe is a Japanese one-pot dish typically eaten in vast quantity by sumo wrestlers as part of a weight-gain diet.
The dish is not made according to a fixed recipe and often contains whatever is available to the cook. The bulk is made up of large quantities of protein sources, mainly chicken.
Chankonabe is traditionally served according to seniority, with the senior wrestlers and any guests of the sumo stable receiving first choice, and the junior wrestlers getting whatever is left.
The idea behind Chankonabe is that a wrestler should always be on two legs like a chicken and not on all fours.
In the Western world, when we aren’t mocking each other with sayings like, "Don’t be a chicken," we live, according to Watts (and evident to an observer) by two codes of reality: the Ceramics myth and the Automation myth.
In the ceramics myth, humans are made from dust or clay by a Creator.
"And so we experience reality as subjects of a king," Watts says.
We are figurines entirely influenced by a creator.
In the automation myth, we operate on primordial laws and mechanisms of blind forces and energy.
"So we impose our will on the world to avoid succumbing to this unintelligent automation. The symbols of our power become the rocket and the bulldozer."
These stories share a damaging effect, making us feel alien in the universe. As if by perceiving the world and trying to make sense of it, we are outside of it.
So inside, each one of us arises all kinds of experiences we struggle to contain and understand to fulfil either myth we believe in as reality.
However, unlike the physical world, where we create dumping sites to separate us from our waste, all the waste from our inner experiences stays within us. This is why we live with inescapable duality and contradictions and conflict.
If our myths are Chankonabe, the throwaway foodstuffs from making the stew pile up inside us. It piles up until we’re being lifted in the sky by the rubbish. Until we have to make Chankonabe from that rubbish and decay because we’re far away from the fresh ingredients growing in the soil.
The contradictions and conflict from these myths have almost only negative consequences.
Who experiences these consequences and suffers them with dignity?
King David, perhaps.
He returns to his Creator for help to face the world He placed him in.
For most of mankind, we push these consequences on each other. Hierarchies are the funnel of passing down misery, and being at the bottom is a slow and painful death sentence.
Those at the bottom are labelled weak-willed in the automation myth and defects from the pottery myth. Those in the middle are decorated like an animal is given a bell, to be noticeable at all times. They are easily hanged for disrespecting or losing this decor.
What is your central idea of living?
“The universe is like a ballon full of white dots (galaxies). As more air fills the ballon, the dots grow farther apart.” An physicist explains the universe to a child.
What is living like?
Watts grapples with an explanation for human living, or rather, the listener grapples with understanding his explanation for human living.
If I understand him, it goes back to the spells that have "turned dirt into gold, gold into paper, paper into numbers, numbers into powerful bodily sensations that we can not deny nor ignore."
We have an attachment to our bank account balance and not the feeling of "home" in the world.
We don’t FEEL the world. We don’t have the sensations that we are one with the physical world.
"Like the apple tree 'apples’, the physical world 'peoples’." He says.
We can not FEEL our oneness with everything and each other because we’re constantly proving to be "other." We’re separate in person, place, and being.
“And we’re terrified.”
So we feast on terrible Chanko Nabe to stay big and steady to avoid being swallowed by the growing trash place that alienated us.
It’s almost impossible to break this way of life. Even as I talk about the state of being outside these social spells, I can not feel it or sense it. I just know it’s out there.
Breaking free is particularly hard because even if the individual breaks it, the social cohesive is stronger than his/her cognition.
The contradictions, conflict, pain are features of our stories (religion, education, traditions, language, relationships, rituals, literature, business, codes, etc) we have inherited about ourselves and our place in the world.
The most harmful thing you can do is to claim not to live by any harmful external story. The harmful story defines even the thought that "you don’t live by it."
It takes a great deal of those brain-bombing things like love or compassion or NDE or giving up or embracing suffering (eventually, when we only have rotten Chankonabe ingredients so we eat our trash away back to the ground, or succumb and become one with it) to break these spells.
And even then you have to live in two worlds for a while or for the rest of your life. In the world of oneness and in the world of fighting for survival.
To FEEL someone else's suffering while congratulating them on their wins. This is the world where a tree doesn't tax us for clean air but someone needs to keep the water clean and safe for drinking. The effects of these spells are ancient so we're going to keep cleaning the mess forever.
We're hosts of a parasitic paradise that's going to be built on our corpses.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that you and I can live in the in-between world.
To live with/treat failure and success as if they’re the same thing. To live with love and hate as if they’re the same thing. To risk appearing like malicious lovers or foolish enemies. To hold dear the vague sensation that we’re fruits of the physical world and to play with our egotistical wants/desires.
Until we find the state of being where these things ARE the same thing. If we find it.
The benefits?
Fewer consequences to pass on to our kin. Fewer consequences to pass on to our environment.
A break to breathe and a breath of fresh air.