Breaking Your Chains

I started blogging in 2003. Since then, I’ve written well over a million words. There was a time when I wrote two or three articles a day.

I thought that the writing mattered, that it made a difference. It did to some people, but not to many. Seven billion people have a lot of momentum, and stopping them or even turning them is close to impossible, especially when the lever you have is just blogging.

Oh well.

Various bad stuff has happened. More bad stuff will happen. As I’ve written before, this stuff is now baked in. It will happen, it cannot be stopped. When you’re going 200 miles an hour and ten feet from the wall, everything is over except the casualty report.

You should probably still slam on the brakes, though.

A few years ago, I turned my primary emphasis from, oh, let’s call it political economics to more fundamental issues.

Why do people believe in what they do? Why do they do what they do? And how can that be changed?

Because, as I’ve written before, the primary problem isn’t that we don’t know what our problems are, or even how to fix them (in technical terms). It is that we aren’t fixing them even though we know they exist and have a pretty good idea how to fix them.

I mean, to repeat myself yet again, we’ve known about climate change, undeniably, since the late 70s at the latest. And we did, well, basically nothing. We know that inequality is terrible for everyone, and people were warning back in the late 80s about it and we, well, slammed our foot down on the accelerator.

And so on.

Now, this isn’t a new pursuit for me. I wondered about it when I was a teenager, but I examined it, mostly, the wrong way–through anthropology, sociology, linguistics, history, neuroscience, and so on.

Oh, it’s not that these disciplines don’t have important insights, but they are all fragmentary and none of them tell you the most important thing, not really: How to change.

I mean, it’s nice to have some insights into why you’re fucked up, but if those insights don’t lead to the ability to become less fucked up, the exercise is somewhat sterile.

There are a group of people who have, over millennia, spent virtually all their time examining how the human mind works, and why it believes what it believes. Spiritual people.

Not religious people, understand; religion is what people who want pat answers to the insights of spiritual people. They suck the insights dry, and turn them into set rules.

You’ve got someone like Mohammed, say, whose first followers are mostly slaves, women, and poor people. And Mohammed, well, he made their lives better; he made new rules which were not as bad as the old rules. Sure, women still weren’t equal to men, but they had more rights than before.

And poltroons and fools think that the new rules are now set in stone for eternity, rather than considering that he was making things as much better as he could under the circumstances and given his own, unbroken conditioning.

Then there’s poor Jesus. Good God, what his followers have done to his teachings! They’ve turned them into, with some exceptions like the social gospel (now dead), an utter force for evil.

This is the fate of the great spiritual figures–to be misunderstood. Sometimes that misunderstanding doesn’t do too much harm (Buddha, yes, some); sometimes it does a lot, as with Mohammed and Christ.

Or, as Marx, a great ideologue, though not a great spiritual figure, said: “I am not a Marxist.”

Or Jesus: “I am not a Christian.”

Anyway, there’s a type of spirituality which basically involves learning to examine one’s mind, until the way it really works becomes something one can’t deny any more.

Jiddu Krishnamurti tried to teach this. Failed miserably. Maybe got one person enlightened, despite spending his entire life working at it.

The problem he had was that he really wouldn’t give instructions. He was scared of the founder effect; he wanted people to learn to think for themselves and not reify a bunch of new rules.

So, yeah, that didn’t work too well.

The simplest rule of the mind is that everything in it is stuff given to you by other people. Your religion, your nationality, your love of sports, whatever… it’s all conditioning and while it isn’t precisely all garbage, it’s close to it. You didn’t choose it, but you think it is “you.” You think your personality is you, or that you are American or Chinese or Hindu or Christian or Jewish.

You’re full up to the brim with stinking garbage; realities created by “wise” men of the past, which served their purposes and which has been, usually, completely unsuited to living a healthy, happy life with other humans in such a way that you don’t, well, destroy the ecosphere, for one.

And the humor of it is in the identification with it–that you, that we, think that all this garbage is actually us. It’s closer to a sickness, a virus, passed from sufferer to sufferer.

And it’s why we’re ten yards from a wall, going 100 miles an hour.

If you want to stop being sick, and a vector for sickness, start by just resting and examining the contents of your consciousness as they come and go.

And be ready to be really unhappy, as you realize you’re a slave.

But it is the slave who believes they are free who is most chained: You can’t break invisible chains.

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