Ancient greeks claimed that it's the most dificult thing is the world and the most blissful, because once you get to know oneself, you will understand the world and people around you and what drives them, because it also drives you. And who you usually think you are is not who you really are.
"γνῶθι σεαυτόν"
A couple of weeks ago i went to the meditation retreat and througout this experience i underwent many personal changes and came with several realisations which may seem obvious for many of you, but nevertheless i would like to share it with you.
There is a pure being (but it's not guaranteed that we percieve it as our everyday life and call reality), every man after having been born percieves the pure reality without distortions.
In order to live in the reality, we need to accept it's rules of the game, we need to learn how to express ourselves via the language and syntax structures, we need to be able to transfer and spread the knowledge, to think and operate through words. The world starts to be perceived through the filter of lexical discriptions - this creates a matrix, i.e the world's perception is already distorted, blinkere. Without perception of pure being - the is no pure knowledge emerging without words. It made me think of Alan Watts who once said "most civilized people are out of touch with reality because they confuse the world as it with the world as they think about it and talk about it and describe it. For on the one hand there is the real world and on the other there is a whole system of symbols about that world which we have in our minds. These are very very useful symbols, all civilization depends on them, but like all good things they have their disadvantages, and the principle disadvantage of symbols is that we confuse them with reality, just as we confuse money with actual wealth.” So let us bear in mind that "the menu is not the meal"
Society is an mechanism, a machine without a purpose, it's a tool: the reproduction of human and material goods, that has substituted the goal and became a goal itself. People reproduce and create the material goods for themselves, but not for some higher aim. The Sense has been lost ( with a capital S). It's not profitable for a society that some of it's part (individuals) percieves himself holistically, like something unique and all-sufficient self, a man has to be limited in reality's perception, to be doomed to loose in advance, to comformity of authorities, otherwise it would be hard to control you.
The educationl and upbringing systems at large are built not to develop and create a healthy human being and to help to reach his potential, but to bring up and grow a goody-goody, an obidient slave of the society. To learn how to be docile and submissive towards those who are higher than you, and don't you dare to question the authority, always following the system templates. As you've probably seen many times, when a mother scolds a mischevious child : " if you behave like that, i will call this police officer, he will show you how to behave". I never saw a mother who taught her children to be free...( but then again, slaves can olny reproduce slaves, unfortunately)
Here we need to understand what is a system?
There is a great amount of people and organizations claiming that they are against the system, but what is a system and why you should be against it? Having dug deeply enough, you can often see that it's not about crashing the system, but just about improving it, making it softer and "more eatable", not about its elimination as such! In reality, it is the same thing as to demand to paint a cage, sweep up the room, to make a field ration more nutritious or appointing a gentler yard patrol in a prison, instead of escaping that prison or somehow trying to destroy it.
So, the SYSTEM, as i understand it - it's that state of society in which individuals are being supressed and led astray from self-actualization, all for the sake of further existence of an average and simplifyed type of a human being. Also, the system is the state of society in which exist unjustified constraints and baseless phony necessity. Here is an example: the work under capitalism is willy-nilly, it is confined, in essence its stealing our time. There are few people who go to work with real pleasure and a smile on their face, per se it's a compulsory service you are forced to follow by requirements, terms and conditions of our society.
Now let's go back to individuals and society. It is very important to understand that the systems not only tames and trains people, but also teaches them self-limitation! It teaches them to see the limits of their capabilities, teaches you and puts this voice in your head saying: "no, no I can't, I'm not good enough, it's not for me, I do not deserve it, I'm not worthy, I won't do that, forget about that" and so on and so forth. A good example, a little kid, not accustomed yet to tunnel thinking, learns how to walk, falls on a ground dozens of time per day but sooner or later learns how to walk, and what would happen if he was trained by society: oh well i tried to walk, it didn't work out, I can't walk, well it's not that bad to crawl. Conclusion: a child's desire is a pure aim that does not depend on the outcome, it's a pure movement, if he thought like us ,adults, he would crawl till his death. Do what you want- that's your law. And we don't talk about hedonism here, it's about living a life in such a way, that your every action would be a pure will, that your every step and sigh would resonate with the universe, and if you do this, you will have no limits, there will be no self-limitation. It is the same thing as to live consciously which is proclamed by eastern mystics, the totall presence in every action is in fact a complete transformation of life, but it is so hard for creatures who have been trained by society to become its domestic fosterlings...
To live consciously means to get on a level where you recieve the non-conceptual, non-verbal knowledge, being able to think without words, being able to get knowledge which is not expressed with words. There is a level of understanding or intelligence that does not suppose the usage of the syntactic structures at all. Using the syntax is the lowest and most primitive way to understand reality. I'd say even more, to explain it, trying to put this experience into words is quite impossible. You can not explain with words something that lays beyond symbols and conventions, trying to explain that is like explaining what is a red colour to a blind man. As a matter of fact, this is precisely what justifies the thesis that we see the world inadequately and bobtailed, because we we brought up to see the reality through the filters of conventions and always trying to put a label on things/people, you see our own mind wants and tends to devide us, to evaluate, to judge. This is where you got loosers and winners, apparaised professions and dirty ones...and this is where the troubles begin. Stop comparing. You can only compare yourself with what you were a week ago, a year ago and how you've "evolved". Everyone is unique and everyone is needed and we are all connected to each other, socially and biologically. We just have to stop measuring everyone with the same scales, otherwise we will see sameness everywhere, plants producing biorobots all around us.
We can come to conclusion, that the system of syntax is the main component of our ego, our phony self-identification, our false "I", meanwhile our true I is hiding underneath the ego. This is something that brings fear into our lives, the fear of change and freedom, the fear of self-expression and death. As a result, it's all ego's skins that is lying to us, because there is no such things as death, the energy is eternal, the consciousness is eternal. To win the ego, or better to say to realize it, means to reunite with the truth and full-fledged reality, to live harmoniously every moment with yourself and the whole universe. I'm not talking about good and evel or norms of morality here. Hassids(judaist mystics) believe that the one, who attained the state of tzaddi(confluence with God before physical death) is always going right(with a complete awareness). Every his step is a solemn ceremony, a celebration of life. In such a way he lives, egoless, merging with reality as it is, and in this state it's impossible to do something wrong, to harm others.
We, ourselves, draw our own world, like the textures in computer games are being downloaded gradually when the player is watching, the real world is being downloaded in our consciousness just like that, it's all about our perception. It proves the experiments with quantum particles that were put through the slits in a stop-block, when the experiment was being watched, the particles changes their properties, which is considered impossible from a physical standpoint and what we call a common sense.
The world is made of sets of schemes, codes and algorythms, everything's kept in line with kind of steryotypes. All the multiplicity of things could be reduced to cetain schemes and archetypes, which somehow connects this topic and makes me think of Joseph Campbell and his "hero with thousand faces"
Glitches in the matrix imply that there is a deeper layer of existence, the fabric of existence itself, and you can access and enter this door. Sometimes it's a very short-lived glimpse, sometimes it happens spontaneously- a satori. Say you were about to die, you heard a bomb whistling above you, and suddenly somethings happens with you and you see through the veil of illusion, symbols don't represent the reality anymore, you are awaken of this illusion and understand that life implies death, cold implies warm, dark implies light, then you realise that you are together with the central self, the totality of everything/nothing, all kinds of polarities and it's all of us, it's all ONE. We are inseparable from our environment. The thing is we are all engaged in a game we play, where you are playing hide and seek and you don't really see who you really are. Hail to you, oh the great actor!
Free individuals reexamine the common sense, for it has been rigged and that we all feel sometimes weird or lonely, but if you question this kind of things, you realize that you are contineous with the whole universe.
There should be an alternative for a mechanical, barracklike humanless society, with cookie-cutter people and approaches. Where everyone feels a part of the whole, where everyone's potential is realized and appreciated. We have the scientific know-how, the medical knowledge, everythings to make a change. But all of this is impossible, without changing the human conditionning and working with your ego. Otherwise, your false-self will always win over of all good-intentioned movements and no political or economical system wil harmonise the relationships among humans. As long as we confront each other, feeling we are apart from each other, trying to cheat on each other - we will not be happy.
Awakening the true self in yourself, awakening it in a collective unconsciousness, awakening the fire in the Universe...
