I've been wanting to write about this for awhile now because it's so evident in the world around us. There are so many polarities people fall into: Us vs Them, Male vs Female, Black vs White, Natural vs Synthetic, etc etc and I just find it funny we keep getting trapped by these things because what one does to one side of the equation one will also do to the other side. Taking a side is literally like looking at only one side of an algebraic expression. What you do to one side you also do to the other. Let us consider the above examples in order to demonstrate what I mean.
Masculine vs Feminine or Man vs Woman
The proverbial battle of the sexes has raged for centuries but in truth we are one species that require both genders. Even the language separates the genders. When you describe something using a noun using the objective or subjective case you are separating yourself from it and assigning it an identity apart from yourself. We don't call women feminine humans and men masculine humans, we refer to them as being male or female, man or woman, as distinct subcatagories. The God and the Goddess. I'm not going to get into all the different ways one could define male and female but no matter how you do it, short of the biological differences, we both have these traits. Short of an XY chromosome, sperm production for males and a penis for males and a XX chromosome, ovum production, and a womb and breasts for females there ain't much that one has that the other doesn't. We might have them in different proportions and in different circumstances but all the emotional, intellectual and spiritual parts are there. Again I'm not trying to go into a big fuss over the definitions of men and women, I'm just saying we're both human however you define it.
What you do to one gender you do to both. If you hurt or help the Goddess you hurt or help the God. If you hurt or help the God you hurt or help the Goddess. Both men and women feel the same emotions. They are both intelligent. The both worry about things like their appearance, want to be loved, grieve for lost loved ones, jealousy, hate, love, anger, both can get territorial or not, can be deeply spiritual, be highly sexual or not, and react the same to power. Yes we have different hormones and different biologies but 1+4 = 2 + 3 = 5. Difference in combination does not equate to a difference in the sum result.
Whereever you find women oppressed you will also find men being oppressed as well. If you want to wage war you must then have soldiers. Men are often drafted to be these soldiers. Soldiers that get emotional get killed. So a culture of males who SURPRESS their emotions and have a high level of dominance emerges. Thus resulting in more emphasis on women being emotional and subservient. Or if one, male or female, is abused as a child they may become abusive of their children. Or as we are seeing today as more and more jobs go to women men are needing to take on a more nurturing and supportive role. Both men and women can go out and bring home the bacon. Both men and women can go out and kill the bear. Both men and women can be nurturing and loving.
(Note: I may write further on this topic in more detail in future.)
The point is if you love and are good to your man or woman you'll get more goodness and love out. If you are abusive then you'll get abuse out. If either man or woman are abusive it's usually because they've been damaged and abused in some way not because they are inherently like that. But one way around a lot of this is to stop thinking of these issues as "male" issues or "female" issues and just as human issues. Again stop thinking about it as "her" problem or "his" problem or as a problem with them, and rather as a human problem because that's what it is. If we honor the sacred masculine and sacred feminine within ourselves we of course will honor it in the opposing gender. And if we honor it in the opposing gender of course we will honor it within ourselves. But if we dishonor the sacred masculine and sacred feminine within ourselves we will end up dishonoring the opposing gender. And if we dishonor the opposing gender we will dishonor the sacred masculine and sacred feminine within ourselves. And this is why I didn't want to go into detailed definitions as to what defined masculine and feminine because it's all very subjective.
Black vs White (insert your favorite racial colours here)
Racial divides are ridiculous! Let me just say that up front. They are just the silliest reason for conflict ever! People are literally hating on one another over a skin pigmentation! Frankly I think it has more to do with culture and economic differences but even that's not the point. The point is using an obvious facet of appearance to create tribal differences when there is no real intrinsic difference between either party. Which is my point. When you start thinking of someone as a different race you are again involving ego. I'm using Black vs White as an obvious example. But it's the same as if it's black vs asian, or Chinese vs Tibetian, or English vs Irish, or religious tribalism like Catholic vs Protastant or Christian vs Pagan.
Again when you label them as black or white instead of as human they become separate from you. That is a key part of tribalism. My group vs your group. But just like gender the differences between races are actually quite minor, ridiculously so. Really it breaks down to a cultural and class distinction. But what if we started thinking of race as a behavior, or an attitude, or an ideology, rather than a genetic grouping? I'm going to use music as a metaphor here. I like rock and roll, and techno, and blues, and none of those wonderful genres would exist today without black cultural influence. None of them! But does that mean everyone that enjoys these types of music, or creates with these genres will be black? No. Just like not everyone who sings country, which is a derivative of Celtic music is going to be white. And there's no reason you can't mix musical genres together. Music is creative and intellectual concept. It's an idea and form of self expression. Now what if instead of labeling someone as being white or black they labeled them as expressing white or black culture. But right away the question emerges "What is white or black culture?" How is that defined. And there goes a big wonderful debate because then you are discussing an ideology that people can SHARE!
(Classical + heavy metal = Symphonic metal)
When you are discussing culture and ideology you don't separate yourself from someone else. You can agree or disagree but it's still a sharing and discussion of ideas. And what I find disturbing is when someone rejects an idea not because of the lack of merit of the idea itself but because it came from someone of the wrong skin colour. That is racism, that there is racial bigotry at it's finest. That would still be true if it was the wrong religion, the wrong gender, the wrong sexual orientation, the wrong geopolitical party, it doesn't matter. Bigotry is bigotry.
(Perhaps inappropriate but bloody hilarious!)
But again what we do to one we do to another. If we oppress or enslave a race what does that do to the "master" race? Well first off it makes them dependent on the subservient class they've just created. We can see modern evidence of this by what's happening in California with Trump's banning of illegal immigrants. Love him or hate him but Trump is shining a spot light on the fact that America is very dependent on illegal immigrants for cheap labor. Take the cheap labor away and boom you throw the whole system into chaos. What does that do spiritually? It divides one tribe from another. And one cannot oppress another human being without objectifying them. It doesn't matter what race it is, it doesn't matter what gender, or what reason you have for asserting power. It can't be done. If you genuinely empathize with someone and see them as your brother you cannot bring yourself to oppress them. But if you objectify another you also do that to yourself. If you make race a thing, if you oppress a people based on their skin color what's the result? They start objectifying you based on your skin color. And therefore after a couple generations there's a whole racial tension in the U.S. Tada!
Again I could write a whole post on this particular stupidity but I'm trying to cram a whole lot of ideas into a single post. But just as with gender in order to overcome racial bigotry one has to stop thinking of race as an other. Turn it into a verb. You are being black rather than you are a black. You are being white rather than you are a white. Then break that idea down further, what do those terms mean? Does being black mean having a history of slavery? There were white slaves. Does being white mean being rich? There are black rich people and not everyone who is white is rich. What to these terms mean. I'm not trying to define either term here. I'm saying that once you break it down into an ideology and culture then you can examine the meaning of it and more importantly share it regardless of what skin pigment one might have. How you affect one culture affects another. And by sharing it you start identifying more as human than as a particular tribe and thus building empathy.
Natural (Organic) vs Synthetic
Everything we have comes from nature. Every morsel of food, every scrap of material, every drop of water, it all comes from nature one way or another. Yet many feel at odds with nature. Which again seems odd to me. We ARE nature. The agrarian model of civilization is all about controlling nature, harnessing it, taming it, putting up fence posts and bounderies to keep out whatever might be yet untamed. Farms, cities, and all out civilization. From that perspective nature is the unknown, the wild, the untamed and uncontrollable. But if one is living in nature, realizes that the fences are merely symbolic and that nature is all around us, that the very seeds that are panted on those farms originally came from the wild, as did the animals. Then nature is the giver of life. Some of our best inventions have been inspired by nature. Solar panels are based on how plants absorb sunlight, we watched the raging storms and then harnessed lightning, we observed biology and learned how to construct robots, and thousands of years ago our ancestors learned the most basic of lessons and learned how to make fire. Our best synthetic technologies are based on nature. But all our problems seem to arrive from this underlying fear of nature and belief we can control it. They arrive from the proverbial fence we've created around us. Synthetic and artifical stuff in here and nature is some how out there. But we wouldn't have the plastic without the oils to refine it from. We wouldn't have the glass without the sand. We wouldn't have food without growing plants and animals. We wouldn't survive even three days without clean water to drink.
What happens when the trees are cut down? Well that means there are less trees to filter carbon dioxide and other pollutants out of the air and there's less plant matter to hold the soil in place to prevent erosion and dessertification. What happens when the marshes are drained to make way for farm land? That means that there are less plants and animals cleaning the water and helping to return nutrients to the soil. If various key species are killed or mismanaged entire landscapes can change and ecosystems can collapse which in turn can mean the difference between a habitable environment and a barren wasteland. Nature is not something "Out there" we need to think about but rather something we are constantly a part of and constantly interacting with on a daily basis.
When we design or implement a new technology without respect for nature we are in fact hurting ourselves. Nature is not, by it's very nature, under our control. We are just one species in a vast ecosystem, on a single planet in a vast galaxy. Where on Earth do we get the notion we can be in control of nature. We are nature and should work in harmony with the nature of all that is around us. Does that mean abandoning technology? No. It means not viewing nature as something to manipulate or control and building technologies accordingly, to work in tandem with Nature rather than against it.
Us vs Them
This is the core of the problem. Dividing groupings into binary us vs them tribes. My group vs your group. This mentality divides and polarizes people. It's also where the idea where if you are with me you can't support any of THEIR ideas comes from, which is all about attachment. And that again is based on absolutism. You can only be one or the other, true or false, in or out, but in reality people don't work like that. In reality there is no Us and Them, there is only humanity, or the universe, or whatever other grouping you want to add. Us and Them, are abstract concepts created to help define subcatagories of ideologies. But if you redraw the circle to include both parties then the question is no longer "does this idea belong to us or them?" but rather "Does this idea have merit and if someone is objecting then why and how can a resolution be reached?" It's easy to say "Our neighbours are crazy!" That is until your neighbour's house burns down and they have to move in with you. Then y'all have to figure out how to live with one another peacefully.
I'm not suggesting everyone be the same or comply with some collective will. I'm saying that social groupings are artificial constructs to help us better define people but that also means we can REDEFINE these social groupings in order to better understand and solve problems. For some that is very frightening because their whole sense of identity and attachment is tied up in their social group identification but nevertheless it doesn't mean that group A isn't facing similiar or the same problems as group B and that by removing bounderies and talking to one another both can come up with a solution or might just reorganize into something more efficient.
When we view a group as an other, when we objectify them, we separate them from ourselves. But when we build empathy for a group, or break down that barrier, we make them one with us again. Indeed one of the key features of empathy and attachment is that we learn how to identify with others and see how to view them as being within our own circle or tribe so to speak. That is why when someone is hurt or repelled by another they tend to want to disbelieve they have anything in common with the one that hurt them. Empathy is the wall, it is the true divide, it is line in the sand between alliance and enemy, and it is what truly divides "Us" from "Them."
When we stop empathizing this changes how we feel and act. It can lead to the most horrific barbaric acts of humanity imaginable. When we stop empathizing we are can reach the point of being capable of everything from an off colour joke to torture and mass genocide. The thing is we can't empathize with everyone personally but we can connect with certain tribes or groupings of people. So the question is how do we catagorize ourselves?
I'm sorry this has been such a long post and I apologize to anyone I may have inadvertedly offended but I do hope that I've brought some light to this subject.
What we think about and what we visualize the world to be we then manifest. And what we do and act on will affect us spiritually. What we do on a small scale also is reflected on a large scale and what is done on a large scale is also reflected on a small scale. I could go into it more but suffice it to say you can make change by changing how you think and then acting differently. And the more ideas are shared and the more people act differently the more things will change on a larger scale.
