I have said this before, but I am watching an old film of Tarkovsky’s (There will be no leave today), and it occurred to me, not as a direct result, but as a trigger of the sort I look for in viewing both good and bad art, that conformity is a way out of inner conflict. It is a path to peace, of a sort.
I have spoken of fight, flight and shame. Most people only think of two. Freeze is one qualitative level down, that of the reptilian brain. But shame is an eminently mammalian response. When we are trapped, and cannot escape, shame pushes us into either dissociation, or conformity. That, or retaining a sense of fight or flight, which manifests as non-compliance and rebellion.
Anxiety, of the sort which people have been arguing since at least the 1950’s is a perhaps defining trait of modern humans, can be eradicated by conformity.
This is the emotional bulwark against which all truth tellers have to contend, in this moment, in this world. Endless motion, endless noise, endless opinions, endless information that is overwhelming to the senses of nearly everyone, creates anxiety. The Simple Answer alleviates this. This is why masks were so important to certain sorts of people, even though they never made any logical or scientific sense whatsoever.
I’ve said this approximate thing many ways. Here is one more. And obviously it explains Stockholm Syndrome easily.
The thing about freedom is people have to be trained both to value it and to use it. And when I say “trained” I mean parents and communities who have read deep wisdom, learned from it, and done their past to transmit it.
But this process is made more or less literal by Islam. Islam means “submission”, and Muslims live within “the abode of peace”. This, even though internecine and sectarian conflict has been nearly continuous since nearly the beginning.
Human cultures have reached countless ways to achieve relative stability, often at considerable cost to the spiritual growth of their members. Our task, in this time, is to figure out how to evolve past all of this. Where in the past we have had relative static peace, we all need to grow up, and able to endure and ultimately benefit from dynamic peace, or what I have tended to call Active Peace.
All of it, in my view, begins with state management, which BEGINS with the ability to achieve deep relaxation voluntarily and regularly. No one who cannot do that will, in the end, be able to travel very far, or add much to useful human knowledge.
And this is the ultimate motivation, most likely, behind our present atavistic urges, to return to conformity enforced by unescapable power. The power elites, themselves, are not free. They are anxious, angry, fear ridden people. They are greedy, depressed, and have the arrogance born of actual helplessness and uselessness.
This blog itself is an account of my own spiritual journeys, and consists, I think and hope and believe, in countless acts of small progress. I might call this perceptual walking.
I wasn’t going to blog any more today, even though my mind is filled with ideas, but this one felt like I needed to write it immediately.