All evil starts with a lie. The Hindus have ample room for the demonic, but at root they call what might be termed “the spirit of darkness” Avidya, which literally translates as “not-knowing”.
I think we all have within us MUCH more knowledge than we ever consciously activate, and much of it we suppress because acknowledging it would mean recognizing and acting on the responsibilities that go with it.
Last night I was dreaming about a vampire–Edward, from what I was momentarily tempted to call the Apocalypse series, but recall is the “Twilight” series (do you not see, though, that there are cultural twilights, too? Goetterdaemmerungen?)–who was very angry. He was telling Bella that the baby would need to eat blood soon. They were walking out, and I could tell he was up to no good. His head became encased in concrete, making him a literal “block” head.
His plan was to crash an airplane into a crowd. I was able to stop him. I can fly, too. The plane was careening downwards, the people were screaming, and then it pulled back up. I talked him out of it.
Now, always these sorts of dreams have multiple levels. On the personal level, obviously I personally am feeling anger, and a desire to strike out. This is an infantile level you can’t really prevent from voicing its concerns, but which you can control both by acknowledging it, and by refusing to give in to it, as I did in the dream.
But I think often what we dream is BOTH personal and transpersonal. Parts of what is out there cause a sympathetic resonance in us. We react to what we feel. We are integrated into the universe in ways that are not readily obvious.
In this case, what I was feeling was an anger, an irrational, striking out anger, that is symptomatic of a darkness in our nation. As I have said often, look at the books our teenagers are reading. Parents are just glad, now, that their kids reading, but they are reading about vampires and werewolves, and graphic violence that would shock you if you knew about it.
As just one example, a book was assigned to junior high school participants in our local book bee that had some of the original Grimm’s Fairy Tales in it, and in which the author talked constantly about how “awesome” the most horrific acts of brutality were, such as a father cutting the heads off of his children and pouring the blood on a statue to bring a servant back; and a ghoulish man who in the presence of a child pulled the soul of a young girl out of her throat–to be put in a cage to die–and who then chops her body into pieces to be thrown in a pot and eaten. She has a ring on a finger he can’t get off, so he chops the finger off, throws it away, and it lands in young Gretchen’s lap. Hilarious.
What happened on Tuesday is not that Obama won. It was that the American people chose to lose.
They chose to crash the plane. They decided they couldn’t handle the stress of life, that they were perceptually unable to see a way forward that incorporated current hard choices. So in large masses they threw their children under the bus.
I was listening to Terry Gross, I think is her name (I can’t take NPR in other than small doses, and then only when they are interviewing conservatives so they can pretend that what they are producing as “news” is consistent with journalistic integrity, which of course it isn’t) interview Matt Kibbe. He was talking about how we can’t afford the so-called “entitlements” (I need to come up with another word) we have NOW. We are borrowing a trillion dollars a year NOW, with no added costs, and how Obamacare just piles on top of those in a completely reckless and irresponsible way, so we need to repeal it.
Her response was incredulity. You lost the Senate, and you lost the Presidency. How do you think you can repeal Obamacare now? She did not even ATTEMPT to rebut his claim. It can’t be rebutted. It is categorically, necessarily true. The numbers are not even remotely ambiguous.
The whole project is one of wishful thinking and willed ignorance, combined with a HATRED of anyone who says differently. It is a living death. Hence the vampire metaphor.
But here is the thing. You can set a plane to crash, but until it does, you can pull out.
And my FEELING, inexplicably, is that in some way something good also won on Tuesday. I think what happened was that the American people were forced to go on record on this cultural divide. They were forced to choose, because the choice was clear. Romney and Ryan–whatever their political flaws and merits–are two sober, serious, intelligent, well meaning people. Obama is an unintelligent functional psychopath, and Joe Biden is in my view a LITERAL sociopath. This is what America chose. This is who they said they wanted to be (and don’t tell me on some unconscious level they didn’t know this, most of them).
Now they will get to see reflected, in actual events, who they have chosen to be. They have chosen to be gray. They have chosen to continue to see storefronts boarded up. They have chosen more paperwork. They chosen to continue high levels of unemployment. They have chosen higher energy costs.
Once you accept that you need to make a decision between two camps, even if you chose one side, you can always choose the other.
People are hungry for a means of sharing their pain, of sharing their wisdom, and of connecting with one another. Obama’s death cult is a means of doing that, but only at the cost of your life. You deal with your pain by surrendering it to others. You become deaf and numb to your own needs.
You have to have a path forward. Even Fundamentalists are moving forward to a past that in most cases never existed. They are creating something new and calling it something old. That is how these things work. In an organic, self organizing system you can never recreate the climate of another time and place, and people.
Goodness Movement.com is my reaction to having seen this truth some years ago. It is not a cult: quite the contrary. Its intent is to distribute meaning as broadly as possible by facilitating its self emergence among countless individuals, who can share and synergize. As I have said, my eventual goal is to build what amounts to a “church”, but one which runs itself, which has no liturgy (necessarily: I am not opposed to locally developed rituals), and no absolute creeds other than my three core principles:
1) Never feel sorry for yourself, even, to any extent. It is ALWAYS and without exception damaging. Feeling pain is acceptable, and in fact desirable. The two are very different, though.
2) Never quit. This may simply consist in not killing yourself, or in finishing a long march. Whatever it is, keep moving.
3) Learn every day. Use both abstraction and concrete observation, and travel between them often. Travel between your mind and senses. Pay attention. Be amazed. React. Build.
As I argue in my initial essay on Goodness, these three principles, if practiced sincerely, cannot in my view but lead to desirable–and exciting, unpredictable–outcomes.
I’m likely rambling. Writing is how I process (and the reasons why this is so I’ve only figured out in the last week or two), but I will finish with a few quotes that have done me good.
“Success is never final. Failure is never fatal. It is courage that matters.” Churchill
“Success is going from failure to failure with undiminished enthusiasm”. Churchil.
And of course, from the last fiscal conservative in the White House, Calvin Coolidge (ironically from Vermont, which was once a bastion of conservatism, and which–who knows?–may one day be again):
Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan “press on” has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race