I see this, and I feel shame. But I look around me, and I see it everywhere, absolutely everywhere. It manifests in many different ways, but very, very few people are emotionally healthy enough to be truly present emotionally most of the time. Women of course are better at this than men, but most of the women I know have so many emotional wounds that it is hard, I think, for them not to be mean and cruel.
It is in the nature of both men and women to be kind and compassionate. Women start from a place of greater emotional awareness, and ideally intelligence. But this can go both ways: it makes the wounds in them hurt more, I think.
We all spend most of our days interacting with shapes and colors, and ideas about them, and only rarely get a glimpse through the cracks at the people on the other side. Well, this is my experience, which I think is slowly, slowly, slowly changing.
At a very slight risk of oversimplifying, I think I want to state that the main purpose in life is to be able to see and interact with productively the people and events in front of you. So few of us do, in this fallen, abstract world.
It is a source of regular amazement to me how excited people get about some new technology that does x, y, or z. It makes our clothes brighter, it mows our lawns, it improves videoconferencing. Where is the excitement about spiritual technology? Do we not already have plenty of things?
We lack for much, but things is not one of them. The poorest among us have shit everywhere.
And again: if we want to reduce our load on the Earth, is it not important to develop new cultural values consistent with being happier with less? Is this not a process which can be done with more and less wisdom? Is it not seemingly the goal of some to create this result with a boot on our throats? Technology might certainly help with that, but that is an imbecilic ideal, as seen from anything even approaching a pro-human, pro-freedom, pro-dignity perspective. And the ones wanting to oversee the stomping, of course, intend nothing so vulgar for themselves. They are superior, you see, even when they cannot define that term outside of the naked fact of their ability to deliver and express power, as cloaked in pseudo-benign rhetoric.
But I abstract again, do I not? This is not healthy.